Distilling nearly two decades into two hours of reading.

Think about it. People who organize and write history textbooks have quite a difficult job. History is not merely the study of exactly when things happened and who was involved. History as a sequential series of events is quite easy to follow, but when you attempt to organize those events by some sort of category, the task becomes rather daunting.

Of course, this means that World War II is especially difficult for writers. Being a "world" war, there is no neatly packaged sequence of events happening in one or even two countries. There were actions occurring all around the world, with multiple interactions between many countries. If one were to organize the textbook in pure chronological form, the textbook would be, quite simply, anarchy.

Yes, anarchy. In the timeline there would be an event about the buildup up Japan's colonies, followed by German aggression upon its neighbors, followed by Soviet communist reforms, and everything else that occurred. The most effective way to cleanly categorize World War II's happenings for a reader is as our textbook has done- by grouping events by regions (or "theaters" of action). However, some events- such as relations between Japan and Germany- spill over into two areas. The Holocaust section is a particularly notable example of this. Some aspects of the Holocaust are explained in the section about Germany's "Nazi-i-zation", while some others are explained in France's section, and while the rest are explained in the "Holocaust" section in the back of the chapter. Alas, the Holocaust section is very, very brief and provides no inkling of the breadth and depth of the Holocaust. The Holocaust section (in relation to the textbook) is written in a way that it feels like a dangling appendix- a half-hearted attempt at something that doesn't really do much in the grand scheme of things.

However- as sad as it is- from the perspective of textbook-writing, the Holocaust simply cannot take up an entire chapter in a World History book spanning a thousand-someodd years. Alas, the Holocaust section could have been better done, but still must stay at its position as a "subchapter".

In general, I would have to agree with the scheme of the textbook writers' ideas. Organize by geographical location, or events from all over the place will cohese into one huge ball (-Gamer Reference Alert-: Katamari!) of dates and random times and places. In a few places, some categorizations could have been better done, but overall, our textbook is quite well organized.