Dan Houser

I think World War II...

is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously.

And so you can get all these different kinds of stories.

And there's so many good... I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British, one Eastern European, just to get different perspectives.

But there's so many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories.

I think...

The most complete one, because it is this all of life being there, probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.

And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read.

And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment.

And it's just an incredible piece of humanism.

Oh, yeah.

I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get, obviously it's in this Stalinist period.

And so they're all losing.

They all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen.

So there's a whole, and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges.

But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building fighting in Stalingrad.

And so they know at this moment they're dead anyway.

And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense.

And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism.

Because it was such a quote unquote beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again.