Odds are, if you know Stephen W. Sears, it's for his important books on the Civil War, such as Landscape Turned Red about the Battle of Antietam. This earlier writing is so different that it's hard even to say that it belongs to the same genre.

This is a tiny little book -- 164 pages in my copy, in quite large type. There are no footnotes, there is no index, there are few reader helps of any kind. Want to learn about, say, the siege of Tobruk? There isn't much you can do except read the whole book -- which, to be sure, won't take you especially long. I got through it in a few hours.

So you won't be able to use this for any sort of serious research about World War II; the data isn't there and the source information isn't there. All that said -- if you want a quick, breezy overview of World War II in North Africa, this isn't a bad book. It reads well (if anything, better than Sears's later works, perhaps because he isn't trying to be scholarly), and while there were one or two points where he seemed to go against historical consensus, the book seems for the most part to be accurate. A bagatelle, but a least a fairly pleasant one. ( )