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A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II. By Maury Klein. new york: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. 912 pp., $40.00, hardback, iSBn 978-1-59691607-4.
Maury Klein's 775-page opus, A Call to Arms, has received rave reviews and abundant praise, including from four Pulitzer Prize winners whose puffs appear on the back cover. Many of the plaudits are warranted. Klein has mastered a stunning number of difficult issues, from the mechanisms of the rationing system to the making of the atomic bomb. His lively prose helps the readers move through the extended sections on the war inside the beltway, with its interminable bureaucratic struggles and political intrigue. and his descriptions of figures he deems important-mainly bureaucrats and industrialists-are insightful and sometimes delightful.
That said, there are disturbing qualities to this...