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 enlarge | Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $14.98
You Save: $14.97 (50%)
New (39) Used (9) from $14.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  88 reviews
Sales Rank: 1916
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 030740515X
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5311
EAN: 9780307405159
ASIN: 030740515X
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 As good as fiction book, but it's history and all too real. August 9, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
As interesting as any fiction you might read, except, it is history and you know what is going to happen, but you find yourself wanting to know what happens next!
Buchanan's work is not a Macro view of the war, it is an adventure into the microcosm of world leaders who determined the outset of WWII. He'll take you to the beginning, WWI, and lead you down the path into the how's and why's of WWII. But from a fresh perspective. From the perspective of world leaders, there quotes, there actions and there blunders that lead us to WWII.
It is not a yawn of a history book, it has the feeling of history with the excitement of fiction.
Cons:
No book is perfect and from time to time, Buchanan would reiterate topics repeatably or in long winded form.
I also think it would have been a plus to dedicate a small chapter on how Hitler started the war machine.
A Definite Keeper! August 9, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
Overall I found Mr. Buchanan's effort well worth reading. However, there seemed to be far too much repetition in the text, almost as if a filler was needed to reach a specific chapter's word count.
As my bias, I would have preferred the scope of Mr. Buchanan's book to have included America. An expansion of America's purpose in having the British end the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, for example. And then the role that FDR and his administration played in the march to "The Unnecessary War." The tale of the SS St. Louis, the American "commitments" to the Poles, to the French, ..., etc., all would provide a broader context to our understanding and beliefs now these sixty-plus years on.
While the references an author has used can always be pointed to as their holding a bias, from strictly an American perspective, in addition to Bailey, Chamberlin, and Tansill, I would have also liked to see Sanborn's "Design for War: A Study of Secret Power Poltitics 1937-1941" and Beard's "American Foreign Policy in the Making 1932-1940" also referenced.
As to "What-ifs" - No Undeclared War in the Atlantic, No Lend-Lease, ... No commitment by America to the British and Dutch to fight for their colonies against the Japanese, ... Many, many "What-ifs."
But then, the American "Arsenal for Democracy" really was the jobs program that ended the American "Great Depression" and began a multi-generational debt obligation.
 Trying to hard August 7, 2008
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
A lawyer making facts fit the misconceived theory;
1. Buchanan assumes that letting Russia and Germany fight it out would have been better- more likely that one or other would have won and gained complete dominance over Eastern AND Western Europe.
2. Yes- Russia came to dominate Eastern Europe- but ONLY eastern europe- not the West too which is what Germany threatened.
3. Russia was evil, yes. But Germany was worse. Anyway, it was Germany that was being agressive- reasonable to deal with the threat on the table.
4. Britain was going to lose its empire anyway. And anyway- who cares! It was about time the sun set. More important that our island stayed free.
Summary; this book did not change my view that it was TOO MUCH appeasement in the mid-1930s which left the door open to Hitler rather than NOT ENOUGH appeasement as Buchanan suggests regarding Poland. But we should make no mistake- Hitler was bent on complete European domination. At some point, we (UK and France) had to make a stand or allow a large- a racist, evil- German empire to be built across Europe.
Frankly, even if the empire had not been evil, we were never going to let that happen without a fight. Hundreds of years we spent maintaining a balance of power in Europe.
 The America First Movement Redux August 6, 2008
9 out of 17 found this review helpful
"Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," demonstrates just how dangerous a good writer can be when he is in possession of bad ideas. Patrick Buchanan, the well-known television pundit and former Presidential candidate, is essentially exploiting the current discontent with the Iraq war to revive the isolationist arguments of the largely pro-German, anti-English "America First" movement of the 1930s and 1940s in a radical and misguided effort at historical revisionism, recasting World War II as somehow just as "unnecessary" as the current quagmire in the Middle East. All the usual suspects are here: the "perfidious Albion" obsession, which sees England's every move as an attempt to lure its allies into armed conflict, the supposedly needless decision of Britain and France to draw a line in the sand at Hitler's invasion of Poland, the imponderable and unlikely "what-if" thesis that Hitler would have turned his attention to defeating Soviet Russia had the western allies let him have his way, and on and on. In the hands of a more reasoned and less polemical writer - Nial Fergusson, in particular, from whom Buchanan borrows all too freely - these ideas would at least have sufficient historical context to make them worthy of reasoned consideration. But Buchanan is a debater by nature and profession, trained to stake out extreme positions, advocate them ceaselessly, and never cede an inch of ground to intelligent counter-arguments. Basically, any book that paints Winston Churchill as one of 20th-century history's greatest villains while casting Hitler merely as a potentially useful bulwark against Communism cannot be considered as anything more than an attempt to garner attention through provocation, albeit skillfully done by Buchanan, whose gift for words could really be put to better uses.
 Brilliant Military/Political History August 5, 2008
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
Pat Buchanan's masterwork: CHURCHILL, HITLER AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR is one of the two finest works I have ever read on the 1910-1945 pre-war and wartime period. I have read and studied this period and the related histories of the US, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Austro-Hungary, and felt comfortable in what I "knew" even though I had suspicions of much else. Mr. Buchanan's magnificently researched and footnoted book not only confirmed much that I did know but also provided an abundance of new data and revelations that were both startling and saddening.
The book reads like a novel but is some of the most carefully crafted historical explanation I have ever read and should be required reading in the schools of the countries mentioned (though I'm sure they'd resist the exposure tooth and nail.) I look forward to re-reading this book in the near future and I have recommended it to numerous acquaintances. This is a "must read" book and one that will forever cause you to see the two world wars and their tragic aftermath in a new and, unfortunately, humbling light.
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