The World At War - 9 Volume Gift Set [VHS]
Sir Jeremy Isaacs highly deserves the numerous awards for documentaries he has earned: the Royal Television Society's Desmond Davis Award, l'Ordre National du Mérit, an Emmy, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. His epicThe World at Warremains unsurpassed as the definitive visual history of World War II.The Second World War was different from other wars in thousands of ways, one of which was the unparalleled scope of visual documents kept by the Axis and Allies of all their activities. As a result, this war is understood as much through written histories as it is through its powerful images. The Nazis were particularly thorough in documenting even the most abhorrent of the atrocities they were committing--in a surprising amount of color footage.The World at Warwas one of the first television documentaries that exploited these resources so completely, giving viewers an unbelievable visual guide to the greatest event in the 20th century. This is to say nothing of the excellent, comprehensible narrative. Some highlights:A New Germany 1933-39: early German and Nazi documentation of Hitler's rise to power through the impending attack on PolandWhirlwind: the early British losses in the blitz in the skies over Britain and in North AfricaStalingrad: the turning point of the war and Germany's first defeatInside the Reich--Germany 1940-44: one of the most fascinating documentaries that exists on life inside Nazi Germany, fromLebensbornto the Hitler YouthMorning: prior toSaving Private Ryan, one of the only unromanticized views of the Normandy invasionGenocide: this film is one of the most widely shown introductions to the HolocaustJapan 1941-45: althoughThe World at Waris decidedly focused more on the European theater, this is an important look into wartime Japan and its expansion--early 20th-century history that lead to Japan's role in World War II is superficialThe bomb: another widely shown documentary of the Manhattan Project, the Enola Gay, Hiroshima, and NagasakiThe World at Warwill remain the definitive visual history of World War II, analogous to Gibbon'sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire. No serious historian should be missingThe World at Warin a collection, and no student should leave school without having seen at least some of its salient episodes. Rarely is film so essential.--Erik J. Macki