Books like The Woeful Second World War

I thought this was an excellent book.Up until this book my sole experience of Terry Deary was a free CD off a cereal packet--I think it was bits from Vicious Vikings--read by Deary himself. I wasn't impressed. OK, a wee bit of history was coming through. And it was entertaining. But it was hard to weed out the bad puns and jokey padding.I've revised my opinion of him based on The Woeful Second World War. Although it doesn't really give you a clear chronological overview of the war, it achieves other worthwhile aims remarkably well:1) Deary gives you some idea of the scale of the war, no mean feat: of the true global nature of the war, of the unimaginable number of casualties both military and civilian, of the atrocities, of the heroism, of the hardship.2) Deary does an awesome job of representing people as people: some good, some bad, some a little of both, but never simpy baddies or goodies based on nationality or credo. A good example is the way he deals with the firebombing of Dresden, describing the entire event as though it took place in London. He identifies the real city at the last minute--AFTER you've imagined it all taking place on home soil (for us readers in Great Britain). And, oh, whoops. We were the baddies this time.The obvious baddies, the individual crazy minds capable of committing unthinkable evil, are not spared. They're ridiculed and scorned and condemned. But Deary never lets you map the sins of any lunatic individual onto his or her countrymen simply because they share a nationality--or even because they share a dogma.Martin Brown's excellent illustrations help a lot, I think, to maintain the neutrality and the ordinariness of civilians. It's a book aimed at kids, of course, and I think it's really easy to look at the people pictured here and think of them as your neighbors, or your schoolmates, or your gran.As with many British kids' books focussed on WWII, it's a bit lacking in Pacific Rim info. I keep hammering into my own American children (who have grown up in the UK) that yes, there WERE concentration camps on American soil in which normal American civilians were imprisoned based on their Japanese heritage. (Ok, Manzanar Does Not Equal Auschwitz. But it's still a violation of human rights.) And somehow the atomic bombs and their aftermath have not made it into my daughter's cultural literacy as this did into mine. But I'd still recommend this book as an excellent overview and intro to the horrors and heroics of the Second World War.The book's final image is a vignette showing two figures in silhouette: a child apparently wearing a GI's helmet, holding hands with a bareheaded man who may be the soldier whose helmet the child wears. They're walking through a scenic landscape with an intact, pretty village in the distance, and the child says in a speech bubble: "Why is it that the ones who most need to remember are the ones most likely to forget?"