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From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In contrasting the many politicians and writers who foresaw Hitler's evil with those who clung even in the face of writings and speeches to the contrary to the chimera of peace, respected British historian Lyman reiterates that our first defense is conscience. Focusing on a disparate assemblage of engaged individuals Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, William Shirer, and many other diplomats, writers, and concerned citizens Lyman spells out how the politics of wishful thinking would never survive in a collision with a Nazi worldview built on entirely different principles. Disbelief became the prevailing emotion even as the war achieved its grim reality, in everything from horrific refugee tales to the air war to the grievous shortages of food. The first-person accounts Lyman has gathered here add a human dimension to his chilling descriptions of this period. His attempt to justify American isolationism isn't convincing, but, overall, this is a revealing and perceptive study of how Americans reacted or failed to react to the darkening sky.--Mark Levine Copyright 2018 Booklist

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

The US is far different today than it was in 1939, when war clouds were on the horizon. American public opinion was divided equally between those who believed in America First and those who opposed Hitlerism. Lyman returns readers to the eve of World War II, and to how American journalists sought to educate the public about the dangers posed by Nazi Germany. Lyman uses first-person accounts of journalists such as William L. Shirer and Howard K. Smith, as well as such cultural icons as Josephine Baker, to dramatize the heart of the struggle between authoritarianism and the hopes and dreams of poplar democracy, as Europe approached the destructive cataclysm of another war. Lyman’s account enables readers to visualize the courage and determination it took for young Americans to leave their comfortable surroundings in the US and travel to Canada to volunteer to serve in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. While there are many important and serious historical studies concerning this period of the war, few, if any, capture the moment as well as Lyman does. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels. --Christopher C. Lovett, Emporia State University

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Historical study of American expatriates and travelersGeorge Kennan, Eric Sevareid, Josephine Baker, and many morein the dawning years of World War II.If most Americans were murky on the details of Hitler's regime until after the United States entered the fight in 1941, some had very specific information gleaned from close-up study: journalists, diplomats, scholars, writers, artists, and others who found themselves in Europe in the late 1930s. British historian Lyman (Among the Headhunters: An Extraordinary World War II Story of Survival in the Burmese Jungle, 2016, etc.) populates his pages with some of the better known of them, including William L. Shirer, who, as a Berlin correspondent, witnessed the Nazi regime's rise to power, and Martha Gellhorn, who tracked fascism as she traveled through Europe. Others are now perhaps less well known to general readers, such as Janet Flanner, who was in Austria at the time of the Anschluss and marveled at how deliberately anti-Semitic laws were put into place. "Jewish doctors and lawyers were slowly being deprived of their right to practice," writes the author, "although for the time being Flanner was still able to buy from Jewish shops, many of which continued to trade." Flanner turns up later in the book, now in Paris, where she further marveled at the efficiency of the Nazi machine, thanks to "the German passion for bureaucracy." The most compelling parts of Lyman's portraits of Americans in Europe in the time of what Churchill called "the gathering storm" concern people most readers will not have heard of, such as the Quaker aid worker Leonard Kenworthy, whose dreams were haunted by the faces of the Jews whom he could not save after the Nazi deportations began. "Quaker diligence, faithfulness, hard work, and prayer came to nothing in the face of Nazi indifference to their fate," the author concludes.Lyman's book does not supplant Shirer's firsthand accounts or Flanner's and Gellhorn's reports from the field, but it makes a useful supplement. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.