Life Style: What We Are Reading Today: Blood and Ruins

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece from of one of the most renowned historians of the Second World War, which will compel readers to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways.
Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.
Author Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published extensively on the history of World War II and the Third Reich.
Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which “we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath,” said a review in Goodreads.com.
“He argues that this was the ‘great imperial war,’ a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires,” said the review.
It said that Overy “explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked these imperial projects, the war and its aftermath.”