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Title: 1944

Subtitle: FDR and the Year That Changed History

Author: Jay Winik

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Format: Unabridged

Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-22-15

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 206 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

New York Times best-selling author Jay Winik brings to life in gripping detail the year 1944, which determined the outcome of World War II and put more pressure than any other on an ailing yet determined President Roosevelt.

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did or that it would even end well. Nineteen forty-four was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler's waning power. Instead it saved those democracies - but with a fateful cost. Now, in a superbly told story, Jay Winik, the acclaimed author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval, captures the epic images and extraordinary history as never before.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history, the Final Solution. Just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis were accelerating the killing of millions of European Jews.

Winik shows how escalating pressures fell on an all but dying Roosevelt, whose rapidly deteriorating health was a closely guarded secret. Here then, as with D-Day, was a momentous decision for the president. Was winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? In a year when even the most audacious undertakings were within the world's reach, including the liberation of Europe, one challenge - saving Europe's Jews - seemed to remain beyond Roosevelt's grasp.

Members Reviews:

ISIS Is amateur

Not wishing to minimize the senseless atrocities perpetrated by ISIS, but they are amateurs compared to the Nazis. Winik, with unrestrained detail chronicles the years of moral depravity of the German and Nazi people toward all who did not fit their definition of correctness. What lessons can we learn from history in closing our response to the evils of genocide? The US has and is guilty. Winik, without specifically proclaiming it, would call a halt to isolation from our moral responsibility to the value of human life. Winik's seamless weaving of so many threads of our recent history into a cohesive, illuminated picture is revelatory. I am so much better informed than I was even having personally lived through the entire epoch. Born in 1930 I was too involved in personal naval gazing to ever perceiving of a personal responsibility to be involved in attempting to effect change--for which I repent. Read the book and ask what your response should be--you may be surprised.

Stimulating

I believe that Jay Winik is attempting to claim that FDR failed the Jews or at least could have done more to save them from the Holocaust. Winik claims that FDR chose inaction time after time about stopping Hitlers Final Solution. Winik thought that FDR could have rallied the country in his fire side chats and that he could have dealt with the anti-Semitism in his own cabinet. Winik does spend time discussing FDRs health in 1944. Winik claims FDR missed his own Emancipation Proclamation Moment by not stopping the holocaust.