Rating: WARTY!
I have to say that I hoped for a lot more from this book than I got. The blurb advises us that her we have "a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century", but I saw nothing that has not been revealed before. It also suggests that "The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth" but I do not see this at all, especially not from what's presented here.
Some of the suggestions here are downright inaccurate. One of the tenets of this work is that people need food security, which is fair enough. It's suggested that if a nation cannot derive this from its own resources, then a nations leadership will look, as Hitler did, to expand territory into areas which will guarantee food security. One example give here is Israel, and the potential for its suffering a water shortage which in turn leads to food problems, but this is simply untrue. Israel over the last decade has expanded desalination and water recycling until it is, as a nation, second-to none. Indeed, Israel is experting its expertise.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was presented here as the same kind of struggle - a wiping out of people because others wanted their land for food, but the Rwandan issue had nothing to do with food (although Rwanda was and is the most densely populated nation in Africa) and everything to do with inter-tribal hatred.
Even had those issues not been in the book, I would still have had a problem with it because despite the high-flying promise of the blurb, the book spends very nearly all of its space in excruciatingly detailing the shamefully aggressive history of Europe, especially focusing on Germany, Poland, and the Jewish population. This leaves only the last chapter for the warning that it could happen again, and I found that chapter completely unconvincing as well as lacking a solid foundation. The author seemingly has tried to simplify everything down to the lowest common denominator of bread on the table, and life isn't actually quite that simple. I can't recommend this book unless you really like detailed histories which deliver weak conclusions.
