Also of interest...in fresh looks at the world wars

The Beauty and the Sorrow

by Peter Englund

(Knopf, $35)

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Peter Englund’s “extraordinary” history of World War I is unlike any other chronicle of that conflict, said Ian Thomson in the London Guardian. Englund, a Swedish historian and former war reporter, has interwoven the stories of 20 people touched by the conflict, from soldiers in the field to an American ambulance driver and a German schoolgirl. Individual diaries and letters figure prominently, resulting in a work of “elegaic seriousness” and “unconventional brilliance.”

Gallipoli

by Peter Hart

(Oxford, $35)

Few campaigns during World War I proved as bloody as the British attack on Gallipoli, said John M. Taylor in The Washington Times. Spearheaded by Winston Churchill, the maneuver on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire resulted in 115,000 British troops being killed or wounded. Peter Hart is combing well-trod turf, but he adds something new by letting British and Turkish soldiers do the telling. “In Hart’s view, the undertaking was a disaster waiting to happen” from the moment it began.

Inferno

by Max Hastings

(Knopf, $35)

British historian Max Hastings’s new book on World War II could be “the best one-volume history of the war yet written,” said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Hastings’s book does for the Second World War what Peter Englund’s does for the First: It forgoes the stories of great leaders and battles to tell the stories of ordinary people across the globe who lived through the war. Collectively, the accounts are both powerfully relevant and “almost more than the heart and mind can bear.”

The Battle of Midway

by Craig L. Symonds

(Oxford, $28)

Craig Symonds fiercely opposes the popular notion that the U.S. victory in 1942’s Battle of Midway was a miracle outcome, said John D. Hornfischer in The Wall Street Journal. Symonds argues that U.S. forces were prepared, not lucky. But as his compulsively readable account proceeds to detail all the fortunate breaks U.S. forces caught as they blitzed Japan’s aircraft carriers, a reader can’t help but conclude that the decisiveness of the victory “might fairly be called incredible.”