Rating: 
Summary: The Conquerors
Review: Should be retitled; Politics & World War II according to Henry Morgenthau. Mr. Beschloss didn't quite make it with this one, no matter what Don Imus says..
Rating: 
Summary: Captivating and totally important book--best of the year
Review: This book is an absolutely fascinating look behind the scenes at a hidden level of World War Two and the Holocaust that I don't think any other writer has been writing about before, and I can tell that because my reading area is World War Two and this was a completely new and shocking story to me.
It rips the mask off of why the American-British war against Hitler took so long -- Beschloss says that F.D. Roosevelt demanded that the Yanks and Brits not just defeat Germans on the battlefront, but that they win total surrender and conquer the Germans after the war. Churchill was angry about this because he knew that Brits would have more deaths (by proportion) than Yanks. (I read in this book about F.D.'s ideas about how -- castrating Germans and killing German generals and colonels!)
I also read in this book about why F.D. would not do anything about the killing of Jews when Jewish groups asked him to during the war--and why he would not drop bombs on concentration camps like Aushwitz.
The best thing about this book is that Beschloss (who I sometimes see on TV) writes it like a story, almost like you're watching a movie, and the author gives you the feeling by the time the book is over that you know F.D. and Truman (when he becomes president)as well as you know your own friends and family.
I am a World War Two reader and no matter what I read in the future I don't think I'll ever feel the same way again about Roosevelt and H.S. Truman and the way the war was fought. The character I liked the most was Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, and Roosevelt treats him very badly in this book. (Truman is much nicer to him.)
Rating: 
Summary: WE SUCCEED INSPITE OF OURSELVES
Review: Easy to read account of how Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin negotiated the dividing of Germany at the end of the war. The book is of particular interest for the way in which one sees how the personal politics of these individuals and their assisants/cabinet ministers etc. influenced the eventual outcome.
Office politics, oneupmanship, as well as personal likes and dislikes are no less meaningful in the Oval Office than they are in your office.
Rating: 
Summary: A superficial waste of time!
Review: Beschloss says he took 11 years to write this book, and it's hard to understand why, since it doesn't seem to have any significant new facts or new interpretations. The discussion of bombing Auschwitz is done much better elsewhere (e.g. Michael Neufeld's book), as is the discussion of FDR's foreign policy (for which read anything by Warren Kimball). Beschloss' examination of Casablanca, Tehran, Cairo, Yalta, and Potsdam can only be described as superficial, especially if we use his prior work as the standard. I really can't agree that this book is "exhaustively researched" - and he doesn't even demonstrate particularly deep insight into the sources that he does use (such as the Foreign Relations volumes). The most this book has to offer is some mildly entertaining anecdotes about FDR, but are we seriously to believe that FDR's policy towards Germany was completely driven by the attitudes he developed during his boyhood trips there? The notion is absurd. Bottom line is that I expected a lot more from the man who wrote The Crisis Years.
Rating:
Summary: A tale for today
Review: Could there possibly be room for yet another book about WWII? I've read many, from Churchill's memoirs to Ambrose's foot soldier oral histories. So, I found Beschloss' book extremely fascinating for its exploration of an aspect of the war I have not encountered in other well-known, mass-marketed general histories related to it. This is the story of how the post-war was planned. Or, as Beschloss says, how Allied leaders attempted to "minimize chaos." The author, best known for his TV punditry, is a great story-teller and examiner of character and characters. As I write this review, the U.S. is at war with terrorists and could soon enter another conflict with Iraq. As I read this book, I found myself hoping our nation's leaders were also reading it, as it reveals how important it is not only to win the war, but also how necessary it is to plan the peace at war's conclusion.
Rating: 
Summary: Small Ball
Review: The subtitle of this book is "Roosevelt and Truman..." It should have been "Henry Morgenthau's Plan." The first eighty per cent of the book is about how Morgenthau pushed his plan for complete destruction of German: who was for it, who against it, and who said what to whom about it. Minutae. The last two chapters - regretably brief - gave a much better overview and analysis. This book was a very detailed look at a limited area. I would have appreciated a more worldly view and analysis rather than the details of the inner workings of Henry Morgenthau. It was fairly interesting, but could have been better.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating story--I had no idea that this really happened
Review: I first heard about this book when I read an excerpt from it it Newsweek Magazine in October. The excerpt's big story was that Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked to bomb Auschwitz and other death camps to stop the Holocaust and refused -- almost without thinking about it. I have read many books about this and never knew that he made that decision himself. The book reports why Roosevelt said he would not bomb.
When I bought this book, I could not stop reading it. This book shows a whole new view of how World War 2 was fought against Germany -- why Roosevelt made Stalin and Churchill go for unconditional surrender, even though that strategy ended up killing many more British and American soldiers.
This book shows how for most of the war, Roosevelt resisted pleas to do something to try to save Jewish refugees and stop the killing of the Jews. I heard the author on TV or radio saying that Roosevelt said that the U.S. is a Protestant country and that the Catholics and Jews were only here because they were tolerated. There is a lot of that in the book, as well as Roosevelt saying that if there was a U.S. demagogue who went against the Jews, more blood would flow through New York City's streets than Berlin.
The book also shows how sick FDR was at the end of the war, even forgetting that he had signed certain documents and then asserting that he had not signed them. The book says that when Roosevelt died, he was planning to quit being President and give the job to Harry Truman and then become secretary of the U.N.
It also shows Roosevelt's antipathy toward the Germans, saying that they all should be castrated at the end of the war or that 50 or 100 thousand German officers should be murdered at the end of World War II.
The book tells all about what Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin really said to each other in secret about Hitler and the Nazis and the Jews, and makes you feel as if you are sitting with them and listening to what they are saying. Beschloss got tapes of President Roosevelt's conversations with people around him and makes these talks sound as if they happened today. Roosevelt was oftentimes a cruel man in fighting with his employees and making them fight with each other, but we have to also remember and never forget he was the one who won the war.
This book is more interesting than any recent novel I have read and is really the way people should write history. I had read a lot of World War 2 books before (my wife thinks I have read every book on World War 2 that has ever been printed) and did not understand that, before reading this book, I understood as little as I did about that war. When I got to the end of the book, I was sorry that it ended.
Rating:
Summary: I've read this before
Review: Michael Beschloss's latest book was supposed to be on Abraham Lincoln, but it looks like he punted on that book and wrote this one. There's not a lot new here and I actually felt the premise was a lot like a book I read last year, April 1865: The Month That Saved America. Beschloss took the concept of a broad look at the end of a war and its consequences and applied it to World War II. There's nothing wrong with that, I guess. But April 1865 was definitely a better book. Next time, I hope Beschloss, who's not a bad TV talking head, can do better.
Rating:
Summary: Beschloss, As Always, Covers His Subject Well
Review: Michael Beschloss is the best, bar none, presidential historian writing today. (I view Robert Caro as a biographer, so I'm not counting him in this evaluation.) Beschloss' research is thorough and he does not indulge in simplistic evaluations of the choices confronting his presidents -- in this case, FDR and Truman. Bomb Auschwitz? Beschloss takes a position on whether FDR should or should not have (you'll have to read the book to find out); but my point is that he doesn't make it seem like the slam-dunk question so many today would make it. By presenting what we know of the reasoning behind the various options available to the president AT THAT TIME, Beschloss writes history the way it should be written. Frankly, I wasn't too interested in the American plans for Germany in the post-WW II era until I read this book. I bought it because of the author, and I wasn't disappointed. (A reviewer above slammed Beschloss' book on LBJ as kind of wandering, which I guess is what you would get if you bought a book of transcribed and edited telephone conversations. You can blame LBJ for dealing with all the problems of the world, and I suppose to do that effectively requires some meandering; but don't blame Beschloss.)
Rating:
Summary: The disappointment
Review: I picked this book up with great enthusiasm, but was completely disappointed. Beschloss has written a book containing nothing new or interesting. Its hard to understand how and why it took 11 years of research to complete. Seems more like a primer or the beginning of an outline for a larger history. If he found nothing new on the diplomatic front, which he didn't; he could have pursued in more detail the personalities involved. The book comes alive a bit after Roosevelt's death. Truman seems a bit more human. But even that is short lived. For most of the book, Beschloss is too focused on the cables or transcripts that he 'discovered'. It's a shame that he didn't build a bigger story around his diplomatic history, so that we could meet these great personalities again.
We know this story and it is worth telling again(and again)but it needs a perspective not a dry recitation of 'On this day', and 'On that day'.
It could have been interesting if he had pursued the impact Roosevelt's illness the last 18 months of the war had on his relationships with Churchill and Stalin. Or focused more thoroughly on Yalta. The planning for his own funeral at the inauguration has been covered elsewhere and better. Why not even explore a bit why Churchill didn't come to FDR's funeral?
Also, how can a book on the destruction of Germany from 41-45 not include George Marshall as even a bit player?
He should borrow a bit from his colleague Doris Kearns, who may be a little lazy with sources but can make historical figures come alive. Very disappointing.
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