The Conquerors

Listening to Michael Beschloss read The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany is like listening to a good college lecture. It's understandable, fast-paced enough to remain interesting, and slow enough to allow for memory. The book is really a Cabinet view of WWII from mid-1943 to the postwar period. Beschlossús reading is solid. He is neither overly emotive nor unduly dry. He allows his voice to rise to express surprise or anxiety, but it's controlled. The tape opens with the actual voices of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But Beschloss reads the quoted passages in the rest of the book. He did this, he says, because he doesn't have tapes of everything and he sometimes quotes from written messages. To move back and forth between archival tapes and his reading could have made understanding difficult. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine