This book was easy to read and was split into 3 important sections; firstly describing heads of state such as Roosevelt and Emperor Hirohito, before moving on to other politicians such as Churchill and Reynaud, and finally concluding with important collaborators during the period.

Enjoyed the photos and all of the interesting information! As a History lover and Holocaust Researcher, I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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It may be that I didn't read the summary of the book sufficiently closely, but - for me - this book proved something of a disappointment. I fear that I may be in good company in this judgment since it seems to fall between two stools in that it provides more information than is needed just to know, for example, that F D Roosevelt was US president throughout most of the Second World War but nothing like sufficient information for someone wishing to delve into FDR's particular contribution to the allied war effort in some detail. Such a book may have had more obvious purpose prior to the advent of the internet, but in 2018 it seems largely superfluous as the information it offers is readily available online from a variety of sources.

Great outline of the who's who for all side during World War 2. Pictures and quick detail for individuals by country. Great reference when reading Historical books to help keep everything straight.

I really enjoyed reading, "World War Two: Heads of State, Politicians, and Collaborators," because it gave each country, commonwealth a brief introduction and gave a 'bulleted" display of information. The book is an easy read and shares a wealth of knowledge (suitable for even high school students). One bullet under FDR says, "in September 1940 Roosevelt gave 50 destroyers to Britain in exchange for military base rights in the islands of the British Caribbean".; I didn't know anything about that and there is so much more.

Before the dawn of the internet (and yes, I am old enough to remember such a time) there were these quaint things called encyclopaedias. For the handful of youngsters who read my book reviews, these were “books or a set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically”. This definition is courtesy of Google, which is how people get their information these days, the internet being the death knell for the encyclopaedia. But as we all know; the internet’s many strengths are also its weaknesses – too much information making it sometimes difficult to find exactly what you want and a related difficulty in being able to judge the veracity of what is served. I doubt the encyclopaedia will ever return to its pre-internet eminence, but in some limited senses, when the subject matter is focused and the facts unlikely to change, such a medium is welcome. Which brings me to the subject of this review.

This title, sub-headed “A Concise Outline” is effectively an encyclopaedia. The volume basically does what it says on the tin (or the jacket cover to be precise) and contains concise entries on all the major Second World War heads of state, politicians and collaborators – though by “collaborator”, the author means governments that collaborated with the Axis powers, such as Vichy France, rather than individuals like Lord Haw Haw. Each entry contains bullet points giving all the important and pertinent facts and it’s thus easy to skim read and find what you want.

This is a surprisingly useful text and for a subject matter such as a period of history which has been studied exhaustively, and thus the essential facts are unlikely to change, the encyclopaedia format works well. Even for an adept Googler, it is easier to skim through the pages of this tome to find biographical details of Winston Churchill or Heidrich Himmler than wade through Wikipedia.

Apparently, this is one of a series of titles, the others dealing with figures from other periods of history. I haven’t seen any of the other titles, but certainly this is a worthwhile addition to the history buff’s library.

This book is an outline of key figures relating to WWII, so the information is of course not in-depth. It is helpful to use to sort out "who's who" in what was a very complex multi-year, multi-country conflict. Avid WWII historians will likely know all of this already, but it should be helpful to those who are starting to dig deeper into WWII history.

Written in a bullet points form and supplemented with portraits, Heads of State provides a succinct high level summary of WWII politicians and their contributions and role in WWII. As indicated in the title, this is a concise summary, rather than a detailed outline and therefore suitable for readers looking to refresh their memory or gain a basic understanding of WWII politics. 

I sometimes struggle to keep my attention when reading history books as they are often dry and lengthy. Jack J. Kanski's book does not fall into that category. I found the book very easy to read and finished it in one sitting. 

Many thanks to Matador and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am not a fan of the way this was formatted into bullet points, for one thing. It comes off as talking points for a school history presentation that they decided to turn into a book. It also is somewhat misleading in the title, as it does not discuss WWII as much as you would expect. The key figures are discussed, as are their backgrounds, with bits of WWII information sprinkled in between. I like how so many different countries are represented in the book, but there’s not enough information on their war involvement in my opinion. The author mentions the date and manner of death for some of these figures, and neglects to do so for others. (Well, they give the birth year and death year for all, but then mention additional details for some and not others.) For one thing, I don’t think it’s relevant unless it happened related to the war, and second, the inconsistency in terms of only including the information for some is bothersome. There’s not even an introduction or a conclusion for the book. I think there are better resources for concise WWII information out there, unfortunately.