Volume 1 of Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-Winning Epic Novel, "The Winds of War"

S. Begley: This book should be read by everyone who is interested in books about WWII. Well written and will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I read this book years ago and wanted to read it again. I wasn't disappointed, even better on the second read.

United States on Oct 01, 2023

Tracy DeVault: I bought this audio book as a companion to the movie (DVD). As you might expect, there is a lot of story in the book that was not incorporated into the movie. My only problem with the book version of the story is that the author wants to include a lot of information about the war and the plight of the Jews that is not directly related to the story. Consuming all this additional information really takes away from the flow of the story. In the end I'm glad he included the extra information on the Jews. While I'm very interested in World War II, I would rather get that information from a book on the history of the war.

United States on Aug 25, 2023

Nick Houghton: Herman Wouk is a great novelist and this is a great novel. It is he second of Wouk's novels I have read and I plan, God willing, to read more.

United Kingdom on Jul 29, 2023

D. Safir: As my caption says, I'm an outlier in that I was disappointed in this book. I had never seen the mini-series of this book and its sequel. Those were a good number of years ago. I've read a lot of books on WWII and the Holocaust. So I was expecting great things with this book. First disappointment was that it started in 1939 and didn't show any of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. I am starting on the sequel, War and Remembrance, and am expecting to see more of that in this book, as it covers 1941 to 1945, which is when the world learned all about the Nazi's atrocities. I thought this would resemble the two books I really loved, Ken Follet's Winter of the World, and Upton Sinclair's Dragon's Teeth. Those gave a wider view of the war in Europe, as seen from many different angles and in different countries. This book was really about the American view of the war. It lacks the range of those other two books. Also, I found the main character, Pug Henry, to be very boring. He is so straight Navy, with a capital "N." Likewise I had no interest in his wife or older son, Warren. The only characters that really excited me were the younger son, Byron and his Jewish love, Natalie. So you can...

United States on May 19, 2023

Empe: Di una storia corale sulla II Guerra Mondiale vista essenzialmente nell'ottica di una famiglia USA di marinai, cui via via si aggiungono altri personaggi le cui storie personali e relativi destini si interlacciano tra di loro.
Per chi avesse letto a suo tempo la traduzione italiana o avesse guardato le vecchie serie TV dedicate ai due libri (questo e il seguito "Guerra e ricordo" nell'edizione italiana) l'occasione di leggere l'originale in formato kindle (e pure in offerta)

Italy on Dec 08, 2021

Kenneth C. Mahieu: “Winds of War” (WW) is a Big Book, literally and figuratively. Published in 1971 and written by Herman Wouk, it registers 886 pages on my Kindle, and considerably more depending on which printed version you might pick up, so the equivalent of up to three novels. But there’s more! Wouk saw WW as a prologue to the follow-up “War and Remembrance” (WR) which Amazon lists at 1396 pages. The story begins with the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, and concludes with the bombing of Hiroshima; the breakpoint for the two volumes is at the attack on Pearl Harbor. But wait, there’s more…. In February, 1983, ABC-TV presented a big budget WW series, shown on eight consecutive nights and totaling fourteen hours and forty minutes (there was a similar series of WR five years later). The two series were masterpieces, and won a number of awards and in my humble opinion, were a critically successful forerunner for the hundreds of series available on TV today. When I decided to “re-read” WW after all these years, it was partly triggered by the recent passing of Wouk ten days before his 104th birthday, and partly recollection of fond memories reading the books and watching the...

United States on Jul 26, 2019

bayman15: After reading with anticipation the glowing reviews on Amazon I came to The Winds of War with high expectations. At last – I thought – a book to rival Gone With the Wind set against the backdrop of the World War 2. Well, to cut to the chase I was disappointed. It’s nowhere near that good.

First, let’s put to bed the comparison with Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s book is many layered and character-driven. It can be read as a character study, a fascinating insight into the attitudes and society of the old American South, or simply enjoyed as a well-written historical romance. By comparison The Winds of War is work is shallow and narrative-driven. You have history and narrative, that's all. Let’s put it this way, if you took the American Civil War out of Gone with the Wind you’d be left with something that I can imagine Charlotte Bronte having written if she had grown up in America about a hundred years later. On the other hand if you took the World War 2 out of The Winds of War you’d be left with the plotline for a 1980s soap opera.

Wouk proved he could “do it” with character development in The Caine Mutiny, an early work which deservedly...

United Kingdom on Jul 01, 2015

Karen: An epic pot-boiler of a book that combines World War Two and Mills and Boon to develop one historical narrative of the way it possibly was. The author deserves credit for keeping the plot going and keeping my interest right until the last page without stretching credibility or patience too much. But it is a pot-boiler, reminding me of Leon Uris or James Clavel in terms of the style, subject matter and scope. The book has one big theme of war and romance, of men and women placed in extraordinary circumstances and how they respond to them. A subtitle might have been "Who did you bonk in the war, Daddy", but I can't deny that this kept the story going (we all like a bit of a soap opera, be it Coronation Street or Breaking Bad) and allowed the author to roam over the causes and effects of the Second World War from his point of view. Which has certain perspectives that might be debatable. For example, was Roosevelt the master strategist compared to Churchill, Hitler and Stalin? Did America save the world? Are all races essentially true to their cultural stereotypes? When the chips are down, is a woman's place actually in the kitchen? These themes, and more, tend to give the story and...

United Kingdom on Jan 25, 2014

Kat: On first glance, The Winds of War is an overwhelming book. At 885 pages / 365,879 words and taking place between March 1939 and December 1941, it's both dense in size and in scope. As a comparison, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is 835 pages / 292,727 words. And yet, I read it in three days.

Essentially a tale of one familys involvment in the leadup to the US entering WWII, The Winds of War is also a close look at the historical events in Europe, the US and in part, the Pacific that culiminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Henrys are a Navy family - Victor 'Pug' Henry is naval attache to Berlin and his wife Rhoda travels with him to Berlin. His grown children, sons Warren and Byron and daughter Madeline, are off making their own way in the world, and Pug finds himself drawn into the war in Europe when he sends a report predicting the Nazi-Soviet non-agression pact which comes to the attention of President Roosevelt.

Although The Winds of War is a dense, intense book, I found myself quickly addicted to the story. The characters were realistic and the writing very true to the era - not in a way that dates the story, but in a way that made...

United Kingdom on Jan 05, 2013