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Title: The Last 100 Days: The Tumultuous and Controversial Story of the Final Days of World War II in Europe (Modern Library War Series) by John Toland ISBN: 0-8129-6859-X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The End of One War and the Beginning of Another
Comment: I read "The Last 100 Days" shortly after it came out when I was still in my mid-teens. I was fascinated with the many stories that were strewn together within the events that were the final days of the Third Reich. It was a real page-turner for me and I enjoyed the mutliple perspectives; Russian, German, Western Allied. Over the years I have read other books that dealt in part with this subject. However, I always looked back on "The Last 100 Days" as the real authority on the subject. Much of what happened over the next 50 years had its' beginnings in these last 100 days and John Toland does an excellent job of explaining that. Anyone interested in either WWII or the Cold War should read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful read wonderfully written
Comment: John Toland is a master. I have read three of his books on WWII and each is a masterpiece in its own right. "The Last 100 Days" is a perfect example. I couldn't put this book down. I have little time to read for fun but when I get my hands on a book like this my time flies!!! "The Last 100 Days" cover exactly that, from a multitude of perspectives: Soldiers: German, Russian, English, and American; leaders; and civilians. It's a story that could have only been told this way by someone with Toland's talents. His words always seem to come alive and "100 Days" is not different from other works of his I have read ("Battle" and "Adolf Hitler"). Despite the fact that I am pretty versed with WWII and the end of the ETO,fall of Berlin, etc., I was on the edge of my seat reading this book. It wasn't so much from new content but just in the way Toland tells the story. I highly recommend this book to both beginners and seasoned buffs alike. Its wonderful reading!!!
Rating: 5
Summary: Still among the best
Comment: I read this book when it first came out in paperback in the 1960s, when I was a middle school student. It made a profound impact on me at the time. I recently saw it in basically the same Bantam mass market paperback edition I'd bought in the '60s (though without the photos and map contained in the '60s version, even though the price had increased five-fold in the interim). I re-read it again primarily out of curiosity, simply to see what I thought of it forty years later.
Despite having read many dozens of books on WWII in the intervening years, I was wowed by Toland's account all over again. Toland was a master storyteller, not an academic or military historian as such, and had a novelist's understanding of the illuminating detail, the minor tragedy emblematic of the whole, and the reader's fascination with the character of people acting under the most extreme duress imaginable.
Toland weaves together numerous narrative threads of the highest diplomacy (FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta), the lowest farce (the goings on of Hitler and his bizarre entourage in Hitler's underground bunker), and endless violent encounters -- between enemy forces, and between military forces and the huge masses of civilians fleeing the fighting or trapped in cities under ferocious bombardment.
While the book is populated with the brave and noble, at high levels and low, it is also frequented by monsters, knaves, cowards, innocent victims, and thugs on all sides (though the Germans, of course, were peerless in the scope and cruelty of their barbarities). This is not the place to go if you are looking for "the good war." This book gave me my first deep insight into why my uncle (now deceased, but at the time I first read this book younger than I am now), who had served as a rifleman in the 8th Infantry Division in Europe, seldom could be persuaded to talk about the war.
Toland's work was also somewhat unusual, when first published, in its lack of triumphalism. The atmosphere which permeates The Last 100 Days is not that of the impending victory of the good, or the impending defeat of the evil -- although the end of the war in Europe was certainly both -- but of immense tragedy and the dawning awareness that at the end of the war, the world was going to remain an exceedingly dangerous place, as the unnatural marriage of necessity between the Western powers and Stalin's Soviet Union came to an end.
Toland's narrative method has been adopted and adapted in other's subsequent works (Toland doubtless borrowed elements of it from others before him as well), but few have been his equal. And having read all of John Toland's several excellent books at one time or another, I am convinced that this book was his best. On the mountain of books on WWII, The Last 100 Days belongs near the top. This book should remain in print for a long time to come because it is great history, powerfully told.
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Title: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War Series) by John Toland ISBN: 0812968581 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Battle: The Story of the Bulge by John Toland ISBN: 0803294379 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $17.84 |
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Title: Adolf Hitler by John Toland ISBN: 0385420536 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950-1953 by John Toland ISBN: 0688125794 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: 01 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: No Man's Land: 1918, The Last Year of the Great War by John Toland ISBN: 0803294514 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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