History from Below

"Yet for all the particularity, these are the generic facts of war, not very different from those chronicled by Homer almost 3,000 years ago. They tell us nothing about why this fighting was going on; they give us little information to judge or understand it.
"There are efforts to show the barbarity of the two empires the Allies faced. The war was necessary, we are told again and again. But these assertions are isolated, lacking emotional force and interpretive detail, as are other facts—even about the Nazi death camps. We learn little about our Allies or about England’s near-death experience, or even about our enemies. Understanding more history from above would have made the suffering more profound and more noble as well, since it would have been made palpable that something was being fought for, that there was an unavoidable purpose beyond the pain."

Edward Rothstein in The New York Times reviews Ken Burns's The War.