Daniel Darabos reviewed Winter of the world by Ken Follett (Century trilogy -- bk. 2)
Winter of the World is a historical novel written by the Welsh-born author Ken Follett, …
Review of 'Winter of the world' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
It's still a good book, but I liked Fall of Giants better in many ways:
I felt like Fall of Giants explained what caused the war. Those evil aristocrats! I mean a world war is surely never down to one cause, but Fall of Giants felt like a solid criticism of aristocracy. From 13-year-old miners to knocking up 17-year-old maids to hanging peasants to sending people to their deaths on the battlefield, it becomes 100% clear that aristocracy was a bad idea and had to be stamped out.
Fall of Giants also explained fairly well why the ideal of communism could not become reality. The infighting between communist factions is a good (tragic) story.
This thread continues in Winter of the World, and I liked the Spanish theater. What happens with Stalin is made less clear, but still okay I think.
But I felt like the story in Germany did not dig deep enough. The evil nazis just appeared out of nowhere! They spring up without explanation in London too, but in the (awesome) Battle of Cable Street they are beaten for good.
There is a bit of implication of capitalists betting on nazism as defense against communism. But while I got the impression from Fall of Giants that aristocracy was 90% responsible, in Winter of the World I felt like capitalists were maybe 10% responsible. But it doesn't offer an explanation for the other 90%.
In all I felt like Fall of Giants was fine with condemning aristocrats, since they are gone now. But Winter of the World pulls its punches when it comes to Americans or capitalism, since they are still here. No mention of internment camps for Japanese. No mention of fire bombing of Japan. The Wikipedia article on the Manhattan Project focuses more on the interesting parts than Winter of the World.
In general I feel like the book could have visited more interesting parts of the war. Millions starved in India. Japanese troops committed atrocities in China. Why not take a look. The book doesn't even visit nazi death camps. I feel like I read through a thousand pages and still missed all the vital organs of WW2.