Winter of the World by Ken Follett (2012)

It's been a while since I listened to the first part of this Century Trilogy - Fall of the Giants - about World War I. It gave me a greater sense of WWI than I ever had before, and now Follett does the same with World War II. Of course he can't cover it all, but through engaging characters in the US, Britain, Germany, Russia and Spain, I learned a lot. Follett not only puts his characters at various critical events, he spends plenty of time on their personal lives, loves, disappointments, and through this we also see various social issues of the day. The book covers the years 1933 to 1949 - so pre-war to post-war.

I don't remember the first book in enough detail, but I think all the main characters are descendants from the characters in the first book. The book starts out in Germany, where we see how Hitler came to power - through legal elections, where he promised jobs, but also through intimidation with his unofficial army of "brownshirts" who closed down the free press and the other parties. I know there is this thought that Germans should have resisted him more, but in listening to this story, I am not sure how they could. And the scary part is, there are so many parallel's to the current presidential run by Donald Trump. I was not aware that Nazism was also popular in Britain and the U.S., that businessmen and the upper class thought for a while that Hitler was good for Germany. (I'm probably going to misspell some of the names, as I listened to the book and am not going to look up the correct spellings.)

My favorite character was Carla Ulrich, the daughter of Maude, who was from England and her family disowned her when she married Walter, from Germany, who is a social democratic representative in the government when the story starts. Carla is bright, wants to be a doctor, but is only allowed to become a nurse, she helps a Jewish family, discovers that the Nazis are killing disabled citizens, and loves Verner Frank, the brother of her best friend Frieda.

Many of the other characters start out in Buffalo, NY, where they are enjoying parties and tennis, and yachting, though conversations start turning to Europe. Daisy Peshkov is the daughter of Olga (old money) and Lev, who was her chauffeur - and who escaped from Russia when he got into trouble. Lev has a mistress with whom he has another family - son Greg Peshkov, a handsome, charming guy that is gifted a black actress for a week by his father when he is 15, studies physics and gets to participate on the Manhattan Project.

Woody Dewar is the son of Gus Dewar, a senator, so he travels in high governmental circles. He falls in love at 15 with the 18 year old Joanne, and it takes a while before she takes him seriously. He has a brother Chuck who he visits at Pearl Harbor on that fateful day. When I re-listened to bits from the beginning of this long book, I kept seeing references to his enjoying photography, so his direction at the end is not so surprising.

Lev Peshkov left a brother in Russia - Gregori, who is now in the leadership of the Soviet army and his son Volodya is an important character to let us see the thinking and actions of the Soviets. He is with the intelligence, so we see how he sets up spies, some normal people who just realize that Nazism has to be defeated. The surprising thing that kept coming up was the Russian ineptitude, because of some absurd orders from Stalin himself, but also that he put people in high positions based on their loyalty, not skills. We saw this in Spain, in not listening to their own scientists who realized the Americans were making a weapon from the atomic research, and in various war tactics. Also their ruthlessness, which I've heard about from the Latvian experience, and books like The Women in Amber.

My other favorite character was Lloyd Williams, son of Ethel, who used to be a house maid, but was now a member of the parliament. Lloyd grows up in a labor party family (there was a lot about coal miner strikes in the first book), studies in Cambridge or Oxford, but goes off to fight Nazis in Spain, get disillusioned. In between he falls in love with Daisy, who goes and marries a pompous upper class guy.

Though Follett didn't dwell on the Holocaust, as that has been covered in plenty of other books, he does show the Jewish situation and has characters witness a mass shooting and incineration of innocents. I got a sense of the politics in each of the countries, when they realized they have to get involved in the war. I am interested in understanding the current Labor Party in England more. There were all sorts of other things from the war that I now understand better. Of course I had heard the term "Berlin air lift," but didn't have the slightest idea what that meant. As a child I wondered how there could be a free western Berlin in the middle of communist East Germany, but never thought through how that might have come about. The one question I did not get answered was which part of Berlin did Carla and her family live in, did they end up on East Berlin? Maybe I have to read the next book to find out, but it is a long read, and I need to read some shorter books first.