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TO HELL AND BACK Europe 1914-1949 Ian Kershaw, Viking, New York, 2015, 624 pages
Eminent British historian Sir Ian Kershaw lends his considerable skills to To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, the eighth installment of The Penguin History of Europe, which spans the classical period up to modern day. (The author will also write the ninth and final volume in the series, covering 1950 to the present.) Kershaw, perhaps best known for his masterful biography of Adolf Hitler as well as his chronicles of the Third Reich, is eminently qualified to pen this history.
Kershaw admits that To Hell and Back is "by some distance the hardest book" he has ever written, and that, except for some primary research on the interwar period, he uses mainly secondary sources in to compose his...