A World in Flames: A History of World War II

Many attempts have made to present a concise history of World War Two in a single volume. The names of Falls, fuller, Snyder, Young , et. al. are familiar to military historians - all are authors who have made the attempt but failed.
A World in Flames is another stab at this elusive goal, this time not by a professional but rather by a well-educated housewife. It would be a stretch to infer that Hoyle's work is an unqualified success, it would be correct to say her's is the best single-volume source yet produced.
She asserts that her work "is a summary to serve as the basis for meaningful studies of the war years and of the political, economic and psychological changes they wrought."
The most outstanding quality of this work is the author's ability to separate the myriad sub-elements of the world wide conflict, high-lighting the more important facets, and then correlating these relatively small units into a comprehensive picture of war in general and
WW II in particular.