I found this book to be an interesting read in that each one of the leaders had an agenda going into the meeting and really neither one of them trusted any of the others yet portrayed as they did. What was also fascinating was how they continued to think that Stalin would stand by any agreement that was made when he wanted to control as much of the world as Hitler did. what also was interesting was really Stalin was the only one who thought about the future after the war and how to expand communism where we the U.S. and Britain were okay with going back to before the war started and this would lead us to Korea, Vietnam, and even the issues we have been having in the Middle East. Still a good read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this excellent work.

History is my favorite reading topic and this was just fantastic. I really enjoyed this and learned so much. The book was extremely easy to digest. Highly recommend this. Even WWII experts will likely benefit from this. Well-researched, well-written.

This book is interesting today in light of the subject of racism towards Jews as well as Asians. Churchill was in fact very racist towards Asians, and had no interest in changing that behavior. Stalin and Roosevelt were plotting behind Churchill's back even though he was the one responsible for rallying the other countries to defeat the Nazi invasion. None of these leaders really come off as being angels.

This is a day-by-day account of the February 1945 conference of the soon-to-be victorious Allied Powers of WW2. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Russian Marshall and dictator Joseph Stalin participated in the conference. (French General de Gaulle was expressly excluded from the conference.) It was the second summit meeting of the trio, following their meeting in Tehran in 1943. After considerable back-and-forth amongst the principals, Yalta in the Crimea, which had recently been liberated from Nazi occupation, was the chosen site. It was an arduous journey for Roosevelt and Churchill, and a long train ride for Stalin.

Each of the leaders came to the conference with a "wish list" for the agenda. For example, Churchill wanted to preserve the world affairs role of Britain and the British Empire as much as possible. Stalin on the other hand was the most determined (and best-prepared) of the three; he wanted to protect the Russian western borders by surrounding Russia with subordinate buffer states under Soviet control. Roosevelt in obvious poor health wanted to get the UN established and get the Soviets into the war in the Pacific to defeat Japan. Each succeeded to a significant degree and in the author's view, Stalin achieved the most: he had a strong hand, with Russian troops pushing into Germany and closing in on occupying Berlin. The exclusion of the de Gaulle from the conference was an issue for the Soviets but Britain wanted France as a buffer between it and Europe. The French general showed little or no gratitude for Churchill's strong support. Eventually Stalin relented to the extent that France was given a zone within Germany during the Allied Occupation.

"Eight Days at Yalta" is an informative narrative history, with plenty of anecdotes. (Bathroom facilities were in short supply at Yalta.) Diaries and memoirs are the source of significant amounts of the story. It's an entertaining read, a comprehensive overview of the Conference, uncluttered by detailed footnotes. The source notes and bibliography at the end of the book are helpful. I enjoyed having the several maps at the beginning of the book. Occasionally amusing, it focuses on the people: the list of attendees made for convenient reference as the narrative progressed.

The author includes as a tag end to this book, commentary about the Potsdam conference implicitly suggesting it was unimportant. By the time Potsdam ended two of the three participants had been replaced: Churchill by Attlee and Roosevelt by Truman. Potsdam, more than Yalta set the tone for future developments, and the Cold War, although decisions made at Yalta were more consequential. This book can serve as a good segue for a book focusing on Potsdam, such as Michael Neiberg's excellent "Potsdam: the End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe".

Recommended: "Eight Days at Yalta" is a good basic introductory text to the Yalta Conference, with a strong focus on the personalities involved.

NOTE: I requested and received an advance reading copy of this book from the publisher, Atlantic Monthly, via Netgalley. The comments about it are my own. I appreciate the opportunity to review the book.

First of all, what a great cover--It truly does represent the tense situations described in this book well.

Secondly, the book is just as great, especially if you are someone who is interested in WWII history and these important historical figures. The author did a tremendous job of researching and writing this illuminating book. It is not dry or boring as so many historical non-fiction works can be. I stayed up late two nights in a row reading this book because I found it so fascinating that I didn't want to put it down.

From reading this, you get more than a brief glimpse into the world of the main players and decision-makers. You almost feel, upon finishing this book, that you have come to know these people privately. I actually forgot for a while that these events transpired many years before. The author was so good at including her readers in the story, that I felt like I was right there with the group, struggling to get my point of view in there somewhere. (I couldn't quite pull off the Stalin moustache though, sadly.)

This is an excellent book that elaborates on many basic facts that have been proferred by other researchers and authors. Definitely worth the time to read.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

This book helped to round out my knowledge of WWII, which pretty much stopped with the end of fighting, and didn't encompass much political knowledge. Since the Yalta decisions helped shape the post-WWII era, this book shares valuable insights on history!

Eight Days at Yalta describes the entirety of the Yalta Conference. It covers the background information needed to understand the negotiations, the day-by-day details of the actual conference, and the aftermath that resulted in the creation of the UN and the loss of Poland to the Soviet sphere. The main part of the book covers the vagaries of negotiations at Yalta, where the three leaders met with their retinues and created the world as we know it. It was astonishing to see how central Poland was at this conference because I had never learned in school about its post-war experience, mainly its role as catalyst for the UK's joining the war. It was also scary to see the way Churchill and Roosevelt were charmed by Stalin, having grown up hearing about the terrors perpetrated by his regime. I still cannot understand why an atomic bomb was so difficult to comprehend, but I guess that's more of a societal change showing within me. Sourcing was very good for this book, relying on minutes taken by all three countries and discussing where they differed. This was definitely a good book to learn about the conference from, and I recommend it to anyone interested.

An e-copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This summer I was lucky.
During the holidays I read the new biography of Churchill, a great piece of scholarship and readability. Then I was invited to join a conference in Potsdam (Germany), another lieu de mémoire where the post-war world was shaped. The outcome of Potsdam cannot be understood without having knowledge on what happened in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula. Here the leaders of the allied forces Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, and their delegations sat together and shaped the post-war world.
Diana Preston delivered a great read. Although you know the outcome of the negotiations, 8-days at Yalta develops like a film script. Not without reason Preston starts with an introduction of the dramatis personae.

Eight days of debates, dinners, political games, larded with heavy drinking and sharp rhetoric. Stalin proves to be the best negotiator and it is no coincidence that when president George Bush visited Latvia in 2005 he compared the outcomes of Yalta with the Munich Agreement of 1938. With hindsight, the western powers considered Yalta a mistake, leading to an unstable and divided Europe. In 2019, we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, the period of great optimism has been replace by scepticism. The Russians are again the aim of a Cold War Revival. In order to understand the geopolitical controversies, history matters. This exciting good read of Preston helps the reader to unravel this.

I want to thank Netgalley for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.

Extremely thorough, very well documented, yet easy to read and follow. Covers the important period where the US, Britain, and Russia sat down together to determine the structure of Europe after World War 2.
I wish that all history book authors would take notice of Preston's approach to writing. Forget the emphasis on dates, and instead wrap those dates into a story that will engage the audience.

In five parts with 18 chapters the author chronicles this famous Yalta conference from preparation till aftermath . Diana Peston is famous for her popular history books and indeed,, at the beginning chapters I found the details for the conference preparations very tedious, full of unimportant details and I almost gave up . However, as Churchill, Roosevelt , Stalin and their foreign ministers and other officials arrive, the book improved. What I liked is the context the author provides , particularly for Roosevelt and Churchill, how their home audience, the political climate as well as health and age, all led to a complex interplay of factors which influenced these actors. Diana Preston mentions how the war was progressing on both sides of the ocean. The use of letters and diaries from a of range of people adds details from contemporary accounts, I also appreciated that the book not only focused on the ‚Big Three‘ but demonstrates the painstaking- often all night work- of other officials which resulted in the Yalta agreement. Hence, a very worthwhile read which adds more complexity on why certain decisions were taken.

This book is a very good and readable history of a very important week and one day which ultimately created, for better or worse, the post world war world for the next 45 years and beyond. the most important and consequential interactions and decisions (or non-decisions) are thoroughly examined, along with some interesting personal observations.

I read this book after reading the last 100 days by David P. Woolner and both books provided me with new insight on the history and consequences of Yalta and how FDR's physical condition may (or may not) have affected the outcome. I highly recommend it.

A great new readable popular history by an Oxford academic who has apparently been producing readable popular history of various eras for many years, if the reviews of her other books are any indication.

I buzzed through the entire book in a couple of days and felt that reading it was diverting, informative, and entertaining from beginning to end.

The writer doesn’t seem to have any particular historical ax to grind -- she just wants to tell you what happened at Yalta, which was, like second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience.

This book may cause some dyspeptic reviews here and elsewhere, esp. by those who feel that Churchill and Roosevelt haven't been flogged sufficiently for failing to prevent Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

This is not to say that C. and R. are found to be entirely blameless, for example:

His [Roosevelt's] remark again illustrated the common, entirely erroneous but persistent naive belief in the UK, and more particularly in the US administration, that Stalin was trustworthy but had to contend with powerful more extreme rivals within the Kremlin who were responsible for Soviet breaches of trust (Kindle location 4017).

but there isn’t a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how all unjust and tragic it all was, which was very. When the author tells you that Polish partisans who had successfully sabotaged the Nazis for years were picked up by the Red Army at the end of the war and executed, she trusts that you will be able to gauge the size of the injustice for yourself.

Occasionally the focus shifts briefly from the prolonged speechifying and vodka-swilling of the Yalta conference to give glimpses of what other people, usually caught up in the fighting and chaos in Europe, were going through at the moment, which was a technique that I thought worked well. One tiny criticism: early on in the book (location 791), the author briefly chronicles the many failed marriages of the Churchill and Roosevelt offspring, which seems not really relevant to the matter at hand and could have been omitted.

Thanks to those nice people at Netgalley and Picador for a free advance egalley copy of this book for review.