Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century

1st off, there's nothing "dirty" about any of the "little secrets" in this book. However, the info provided is new to me, very interesting, and very well written. It's amazing that so much of this material it new to me, I've enjoyed this book a lot and I suspect that you will too.

I really liked this book because it didnt sound like my history teacher. I'm no historian, but the writer's explanations is somewhat similar to my grandparents and relative's never ending tale of the past.I'd recommend this for the young people, like me, who would like to read about history--- its a way to start liking it.

This book reaffirms me in thinking that to be informed isn't listening to news from radio or TV but an active process and for this the anterior means have a low value. If you want to be really informed and no plenty of dubitous rumours, you must read and perhaps look an screen but not a commercial one. This book is pleasant and I think informative and fiable in a ligth style. Of course it deals with so many themes which I can't say if the author is ever rigth. One at less is false: the average safety razor blade doesn't fits 20- 40 shavings at less you have to elect between this or a bayonet under machine gun fire. General point of view is from USA and in other countries the reader can disagree about some questions but in general is acceptable and at last America is the country of the XX century as Greeks were in 500 B.C. As it were I think human life and change of customs can't be measured by administrative periods, centuries, years, weeks... this only fits for book- keepers. Dunningan seems to be better informed about war and weapons and really he is not very optimistic about politics and peace. The author highligths the falseness of many concepts commonly believed by many people but he does these withouth resort to sophisticated philosophical concepts, a custom very own of Europe which frequently becomes a defect because in common life there's not so many time for abstract thinking but much things to do.

In many ways this is excellent history. Dunnigan writes quite readably; his analysis is succinct and includes the right amount of information; a great deal of ground is covered. While Dunnigan has mostly written about military history matters in the past, he proves here that he is a versatile historian well able to handle sociological and economic matters. I find most of his statements well defended.The only problem seems merely semantic, but it will affect most potential buyers: the title 'Dirty Little Secrets' leads one to believe that there will be a lot of classified data, stuff people were keeping hidden on purpose, and other Great Revelations. The majority of the book does not contain that. What it contains is discussion of various social and economic events and how they shaped history throughout the century. There are few 'secrets', and few of those are really 'dirty'. In my opinion that's only worth a one-star markdown on what is otherwise quite a good history book.