1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History - Hardcover

Jay Winik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439114080 ISBN 13: 9781439114087

Publisher: Simon & Schuster International, 2015

Synopsis

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did, or that it would even end well. 1944 was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler's waning power. Instead, it saved those democracies-but with a fateful cost. 1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his re-election, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history, the Final Solution. Just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis were accelerating the killing of millions of European Jews. Winik shows how escalating pressures fell on an all but dying Roosevelt, whose rapidly deteriorating health was a closely guarded secret. Here then, as with D-Day, was a momentous decision for the president. Was winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? In a year when even the most audacious undertakings were within the world's reach, including the liberation of Europe, one challenge-saving Europe's Jews-seemed to remain beyond Roosevelt's grasp. Winik provides a stunningly fresh look at the twentieth century's most pivotal year. 1944: FDR and the Year that Changed History is the first book to tell these events with such moral clarity and unprecedented sweep, and a moving appreciation of the extraordinary struggles of the era's outsized figures.

About this title

Review:

"It's gratifying to hear someone called a public historian, as the "Baltimore Sun" said of Winik.... Here he follows up his "New York Times" best-selling" The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World" with a study of one crucial year in the wartime administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." --Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

About the Author:

JAY WINIK is the author of the New York Times bestseller APRIL 1865, which received wide international acclaim. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. A senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland, he is a member of the governing council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Winik lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster International
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1439114080
• ISBN 13: 9781439114087
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 656