Inferno

The World at War, 1939-1945

By: Max Hastings

Narrated by: Ralph Cosham

Length: 31 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's Summary

From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.

World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost 60 million lives - an average of 27,000 a day. For 35 years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire war. 

Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people - of soldiers, sailors, and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad, some of whom resorted to cannibalism during the two-year siege; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews - Hastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. He simultaneously traces the major developments - Hitler’s refusal to retreat from the Soviet Union until it was too late; Stalin’s ruthlessness in using his greater population to wear down the German army; Churchill’s leadership in the dark days of 1940 and 1941; Roosevelt’s steady hand before and after the United States entered the war - and puts them in real human context.

Hastings also illuminates some of the darker and less explored regions under the war’s penumbra, including the conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland, during which the Finns fiercely and surprisingly resisted Stalin’s invading Red Army; and the Bengal famine in 1943 and 1944, when at least one million people died in what turned out to be, in Nehru’s words, “the final epitaph of British rule” in India. 

Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the 20th century.

©2011 Max Hastings (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“A new, original, necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflict in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority.... Inferno is superb.” (Richard J. Evans, The New York Times Book Review)

“If there is a contemporary British historian who is the chronicler of World War II, it would be Max Hastings.... [Inferno] is a true distillation of everything this historian has learned from a lifetime of scholarship - and more important, of real thought - on what he calls ‘the greatest and most terrible event in human history.’” (Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle) 

“Compellingly different...a panoramic social history that not only recounts the military action with admirable thoroughness, crispness and energy but also tells the story of the people who suffered in the war, combatants and civilians alike.” (Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal) 

Superb

Having read hundreds of books on WWII, I wasn’t looking for a single volume history.

But Max Hastings wrote it, so I read the glowing reviews and took the plunge.

To weave a coherent, compelling narrative out of such a sprawling collection of wars and peoples is no small feat. I recommend it as a first book on the subject. Just as heartily, I recommend it as the thousandth book on the subject. One learns the story itself or how to tell it. Both are fundamental.

This book is a major contribution to the literature.

Illuminating and enjoyable

Well written, well read, and unique in its treatment of some source material and the subject as a whole. Very enjoyable, in that it feels like a meaningfully different approach that does not seek to glorify any aspect of the war.