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A minutely-detailed survey of the Allied bombing of Germany. Some passages are gripping, others are impossibly boring and repetitive (see the 'Land' chapter). The overall intention is the reconstruct the catastrophe of civilian bombing, from strategic draft boards in England in 1940 to the psyche of the ordinary citizen in small German towns in 1945. Not surprisingly, Friedrich is deliberately inflammatory, blending vocabulary culled from Holocaust scholarship with first-person recollection of the firestorms that swept through German communities during the bombings. The upshot is that this book makes a number of powerful observations, most all of which are undercut by cliche or difficult-to-prove claim. Friedrich's work, then, is anything but a sober contemplation of the topic at hand. It's a best-seller in Germany (and England, I believe), but it is more of a call-to-arms than any definitive, balanced study of the issues. No surprise, then, that this book is basically unrateable.