I think there may be a problem here, in that having read Professor Overy's other works (see How the Allies Won, for instance) and heard him speak, I get the feeling that the reviewer has either failed to capture all the nuances of the argument, or has read the book as confirming his/her opinions on the bomber offensive...
How the Allies Won talks about the contribution made by the bombing offensive to victory, and Overy is - IIRC - credited by Adam Tooze (an economic historian who gives the bomber offensive credit for hampering the German war economy in his book) as helping him get to the right sort of answers about the effect of bombing.
Overy has been going through the archives since the papers became available and has spoken to an awful lot of veterans. I gather that Overy has gone through the surviving papers from the German side as well, which is more than many historians of the bomber offensive have done. He's certainly aware of what Speer had to say (he may even have interviewed him about it as well, if memory serves).
Overy certainly wouldn't have made the mistake of referring to the Air Staff as the General Staff for a start, and given that the review is decidedly egalitarian in stripping him of his Professorship, I think I might be prepared to give him a chance on this - even if it is to give a library copy a read to work out whether I'll be going to the well-known riverine purveyor of books to get my own copy. But to dismiss the book on the strength of a review in the Economist seems a bit harsh, to be frank...
Last edited by Archimedes; 24th Sep 2013 at 16:56.