By Jay Sekulow
The left's outrage over the IRS turns to a plea to 'move on'
"Battle Cry of Freedom," by Princeton's James M. McPherson, won a Pulitzer Prize for the author in 1989 and remains the best single-volume history of the American Civil War. If it had any shortcoming, it was the author's limited treatment of the war at sea. This brisk volume attempts to meet that perceived shortcoming.
The U.S. Army entered World War II with distinct assets and liabilities. On the debit side, it was small in terms of personnel. Much of its equipment was inferior to the Germans' in both quality and quantity. And its senior officers had no combat experience to compare with that of the enemy.
Virtually every adult in the Western world is by now aware of the barbarities committed by Hitler's Germany. A smaller number recognize that Stalin also was guilty of many atrocities. What Yale professor Timothy Snyder has now provided is a detailed recounting of the massive bloodletting in the lands between Germany and the Soviet Union before and during World War II.
To write the "biography" of a city of nearly 5 million is a challenging literary task. When the city in question is Berlin, and the time frame that of World War II, the challenge is even greater.
America has long been fascinated by its Civil War, which has inspired thousands of books and scores of TV series. It pays much less attention to the revolution that brought independence to the first modern republic and that was a turning point in Western history.
