'History at its scintillating best ... hard-hitting revelatory and superbly researched' Andrew
Roberts author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny 'A rare achievement ... sure to become an
instant classic' John Lewis Gaddis Yale University This gripping book dramatizes the
extraordinarily compressed and terrifying period between the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. These five days transformed much
of the world and have shaped our own experience ever since. Simms and Laderman's aim in the
book is to show how this agonizing period had no inevitability about it and that innumerable
outcomes were possible. Key leaders around the world were taking decisions with often poor and
confused information under overwhelming pressure and knowing that they could be facing
personal and national disaster. And yet there were also long-standing assumptions that shaped
these decisions both consciously and unconsciously. Hitler's American Gamble is a superb work
of history both as an explanation for the course taken by the Second World War and as a study
in statecraft and political choices.
