INSIDE this ponderous book is a slim polemical volume struggling to get out. Norman Davies, a professor emeritus at London University, holds passionate views about World War II, and in "No Simple Victory" he seeks to correct popular misconceptions about that "good war." A specialist in Eastern Europe, Davies advances two strong claims about the way the history of World War II should be written and remembered. First, he insists that historians as well as laymen should focus less on the Western front and more on the Eastern, where the heaviest fighting and the greatest destruction and suffering occurred. We know a lot about the blitz over England but little about the Nazi bombings of Poland in 1939. While it is an exaggeration to claim, as Davies does, that most histories of World War II underplay the war in the East, he is right to point out an imbalance in many people's knowledge of it compared with their grasp of the fighting in the West. As he explains, this is partly due to the long period of the cold war, during which many archives were closed; since the 1990s, however, much new work has appeared on the war in the East. Davies presents no new findings but mines the existing secondary sources. His second claim is that historians have been far too lenient toward Stalin, overlooking his career as a mass murderer and emphasizing only Hitler's crimes. As he states repeatedly, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 was the work not only of the Nazis but also of the Soviets. Stalin had made a pact with Hitler; to call the invasion of Poland "Hitler's war," as many historians do, is therefore incorrect. But Davies is too literal, since it is beyond doubt that the chief aggressor in World War II was Germany, even during the two years the Hitler-Stalin pact was in effect; and it was Germany that attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Still, he has a point, and he is not the first to make it: Stalin, being one of the Allies, got away with a lot, both as regards Soviet atrocities against civilians (like the pillaging and raping that accompanied the Red Army's drive westward) and in the negotiations at Yalta and other conferences, where the Western leaders, beginning with Churchill and Roosevelt, allowed Stalin to lay claim to almost all the countries "liberated" by the Soviet Army in 1945. Davies blames these leaders for paving the way to the Iron Curtain and the cold war. The argument against seeing all good on the Allied side and all evil on the Axis side is thought-provoking, as are Davies's often informative accounts of events on the Eastern front. His chapter titled "Warfare" gives an excellent brief military history of the entire war in Europe and North Africa. But the book's polemical punch gets lost in layers of unnecessary padding and repetition, so that by the end the reader is exasperated rather than persuaded. When I read the fifth or sixth indignant reference to the Warsaw rising of 1944, where the Polish Home Army was "betrayed" by Stalin and the Allies in its heroic fight against the Nazis, I merely shrugged: this is one of Davies's obsessions, I said to myself (he is the author of a book on the Warsaw rising). Another obsession is the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which 25,000 Polish officers were shot by Soviet forces. Each topic is mentioned more than 10 times, usually to illustrate the author's pet thesis that Stalin was a horrible dictator in a league with Hitler. Weapons captured from Poles in German-occupied Warsaw, 1939. Repetition is not the only problem, however. Davies believes that in order to avoid oversimplification, one must have a "framework" for a "definitive and comprehensive" history of the war; but the framework he presents consists of bits and pieces of information in multiple fragments grouped under general chapter titles like "Politics," "Soldiers" and "Civilians." The result for the reader is, at best, head-scratching bemusement, at worst, exhaustion and suspicion. The "Civilians" chapter is made up of 69 sections arranged under three larger headings, the last of them labeled "Miscellaneous Groups in Wartime." From aristocrats to women, by way of diplomats, fascists, heroines, historians, music lovers, occupiers, poets, this is an alphabetical listing of 38 "groups," each represented by one or two examples. Under poets, the single example is Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who had the distinction of being anti-Stalinist. Davies's method is best qualified as haphazard encyclopedism: all categories are covered, but only with potshots, in pieces designed to show that the war was not "simple." The writing is plodding, and at times puzzlingly elliptical. Take, for example, the paragraph devoted to Kurt Vonnegut. It is in the section on prisoners of war in the "Soldiers" chapter, which notes that the war had a total of 10 million P.O.W.'s, many of them never to return. The section ends with nine thumbnail biographies; No. 8 is Vonnegut: "Kurt Vonnegut (born 1922), a scout of the U.S. 106th Infantry Division, was captured in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, and as a P.O.W. witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. A well-known writer, he is the author of the semiautobiographical 'Slaughterhouse-Five' (1969). He succeeded Isaac Asimov as president of the American Humanist Association." One truly wonders to whom this information is directed. Surely English-speaking readers of this book will have heard of Vonnegut (they probably also know that he died several months ago), and many will have read "Slaughterhouse-Five." The last sentence gives us a fact we may not have known - but is it worth knowing? In other places, Davies's haphazard encyclopedism produces more disturbing effects. He ends the section on discipline in the "Soldiers" chapter with a paragraph on Theodore Schurch, a truck driver with the Royal Army who acted as an informant for German and Italian intelligence and was tried after the war for "treachery" and desertion. Davies adds: "He appears to have had a connection before the war with Mosley's Blackshirts, and at his trial he objected to one of the prosecuting officers being Jewish. The objection was upheld. The defendant was hanged." Are we supposed to understand from this that Schurch was hanged because he objected to a Jewish prosecutor? Was his objection really upheld? Here as elsewhere, we are left baffled - and wondering what the author is not saying. Under "Civilians," he discusses deportation with the claim that "both Nazis and Soviets" practiced it, then notes that the biggest wave of deportations occurred in 1945, when Germans were expelled from East Prussia and the Baltic. The Nazis' deportation of Jews is mentioned here, but only in the context of early ghettoization in Poland, not in that of the transports to death camps from all over Europe - and Davies equates the fate of the Jews under the Nazis with the Soviets' expulsion of the Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan in 1944! This is done via a reference to a later section, titled "Resettlement." Meanwhile, we have this remark: "Deportations were rarely associated with death sentences in the minds of their authors. But death was a frequent outcome." Davies is referring to the displacement of refugees in Germany and Poland, not to that of Jews (whose deaths were most definitely in the minds of their deporters). Jews are dealt with in a later section titled "Genocide." A KINDLY interpretation will conclude that such fragmentation produces unintended perverse effects, like "forgetting" about the meaning of deportation for Jews. A less kindly one may find darker motives behind this piecemeal treatment: by dividing his "comprehensive" history this way, Davies can drown the events and meaning of the Holocaust in an ocean of mismatched facts. The Soviets were as bad as the Germans, the Holocaust was not the only terrible thing that happened to innocent civilians, deportation was not part of genocide. Speculations about motives aside, "No Simple Victory" is too long and tedious to be read from cover to cover (as I dutifully did). If you want to read a beautifully written history of the significance and consequences of World War II, including the Eastern front and Stalin's crimes, I'd recommend Tony Judt's "Postwar." Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of "Crises of Memory and the Second World War."

Ex-Nazi prosecutor Gerhard Self (Self's Punishment, 2005), still working as a private eye in a reunified Germany, gets a case that involves somebody else's political guilt, or lack thereof. Undersecretary Salger's daughter has gone missing from the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation, where, like a good European, she'd been studying French and English. Although the minister's manners are brusque to the point of rudeness, Self likes the look of Leonore Salger's photo and the sound of her father's banknotes. So he makes some routine inquiries and discovers from Dr. Rolf Wendt that Leo had been a patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital until she fell out a fourth-story window last week. The story of her death rings so patently untrue--no relatives have been notified, there's been no inquiry into the details of the accident, nobody else in the hospital knows that it even happened--that Self keeps digging, and all too soon realizes he's dug entirely too far. Leo isn't dead but in hiding; she's on the run from state officials who want to interview her about a terrorist attack on an American military installation in the Lampertheim National Forest; the government is less interested in exposing the consequences of the attack than in covering them up; and it looks as if Self's client isn't really Leo's father or an undersecretary of anything. Antic, laconic, melancholy and oddly extroverted--a tonic corrective for two generations of German self-scrutiny. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In German author Schlink's meandering second crime novel available in English to feature aging PI Gerhard Self (after Self's Punishment), a man named Salger hires Self to locate his missing daughter, Leonore. With little help from the father, Self tracks the missing girl to an insane asylum outside Heidelberg, where he's informed by a doctor that Leo has recently died there in an accident. Self quickly learns, among other details, that the death report is untrue, Leo's father is not really her father and that the case is connected to a top-secret government investigation. Self can be completely off the wall one minute--he lies outrageously to anyone who might have information and breaks-and-enters without compunction--and the next he's as comfortable as an old shoe, having a glass of Riesling and hanging out with his cat, Turbo. The eccentric detective is the big draw, with the less than action-packed investigation coming in a distant second. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved