As anyone familiar with Victor Davis Hanson’s writing would expect, his new, exhaustively researched summary of World War II comes from a novel angle and is a very stimulating and original work.1 The war is not approached chronologically, and its origins are only cursorily summarized, but it is examined thematically, as if by a scanner or ultrasound from different perspectives. Thus, the plural title Second World Wars and the subtitle How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. The component analyses are grouped in the vast categories of Ideas, Air, Water, Earth, Fire, People, and Ends. This technique produces, from early on, an extensive variety of surprising facts that are very informative and will enhance the knowledge even of people who are already well read on the subject.

These insights from unusual angles start with the very first paragraphs, where it is explained that from the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939 to the formal end of it on September 2, 1945, twenty-seven thousand people perished in war-related activity every single day: sixty million people, an unheard-of total in world war-making history, and almost four times the total of World War I, in which a large number of deaths were from epidemics. The subtitle refers to World War IIas the “first global conflict,” by which Mr. Hanson apparently means that, despite the small though historically important skirmishes in North America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the far Pacific,