Rating: 
Summary: Good plot and characters, bad storytelling
Review: Harry Turtledove certainly knows his history, and his characters have the instincts and motivations of real people. But his writing skills are deteriorating. This would have been a far better story if it had been told largely through the events and the actions of the characters in response to those events. Instead, a lot of the book was spent telling us the thoughts and philosophies of the characters. Turtledove has always had this tendency, but his recent books are worse. And he tells the audience many things which are obvious from context. If his editor had cut the book by 20%, it would have been an improvement. I rate the book 4 stars for plot and characters, but only 2 stars for writing skills.
Rating: 
Summary: A very exciting book
Review: I would say that this entire series is perfect, and that this was one of the best ending books in an entire series that I have read since the DUNE series. The evolution of the characters was exquisetly written, and the reaction of every nation in subterfuge and open warfare was extremely interesting, and very logically assumed after the changes in history. All in all I would say that this was an extremely good boook and one I couldn't put down. I would recomend this entire series and book to anyone, and cannot wait until the succeeding series arrive.
Rating:
Summary: Hmmmmm
Review: Up until Breakthroughs, Turtledove's treatment of the Great War makes sense. Despite the US/CSA rupture, events in Europe continued as they have in our timeline and an assassination in Sarajevo triggers global conflict. The glimpses we were given of the European fronts showed that the war was carrying on much as we would expect.In our history, the stalemate in the west broke only after the US began to supply the Allies with troops and material, in early 1918. US support was critical to the Allied effort as Russia was out of the war and Germany was free to transfer forces from the East to the West. In Turtedove's world, however, the Allied collapse comes *before* Russia's collapse. How? Why? And why is there no mention of the events in Russia? Surely the rise of the Bolsheviks would resonate with Flora Hamburger. (And while we're at it, why wasn't Trotsky in New York when the war began as he was in our history?) Unfortunately, I had so keenly been looking forward to the Bolshevik Revolution rekindling the socialist movement in the US/CSA that it's lack detracted greatly from the rest of the book. Beyond that, Turtledove's insistence of following a dozen characters four pages at a time continues to be annoying, however each storyline is entertaining and at times moving.
Rating:
Summary: Beakthroughs a bit too broken up
Review: Turtledove knows his history and his views of alternative results had one or two important incidents in the past been reversed are enormously interesting and certainly possible. I reserve the right to disagree with him on a couple of important points, but after all, alternative histories are completely subjective. Often they represent educated guesses as to what might have happened, but they are guesses nevertheless. He writes exceedingly well, and his stories grab and hold the reader -- while they last. This particularly talent has, unfortunately, a bad side to it. Turtledove has a propensity to slip from place to place, person to person, and situation to situation, without warning, and an individual situation will become so intriguing that I, personally, refuse to leave it. I more often than not find myself flipping through a dozen or so pages looking for the continuation of the adventure in which I just became embroiled. In so doing I will ignore whole episodes within the entire mass merely to follow the exploits of two or three characters caught up in their own personal circumstances. This is unfortunate because it is so unnecessary. Covering all the events that he endeavors to exploit adds very little to the whole if for no other reason than it invites confusion. My answer? Concentrate on one, or at most two, different characters or situations and and place the rest in books of their own. The way he writes, each could be made into a fascinating tale and the results would be more lucrative for him and a lot more enjoyable for me.
Rating: 
Summary: A good solid alternative history book
Review: Turtledove is the master of alternative history. I gave this book 4 of 5 stars because it is a solid read that has lots of interesting plots and subplots with decent character development. It lost one star because many of the decisions made by historical characters are not the decisions that I believe they would have made under the circumstances as presented (not being a PhD in history I allow that Turtledove, who is, may know more about this than I).
Rating:
Summary: I thought the "Confederate Air Force"...
Review: ...was a travelling exhibit of antique aircraft. But to the John Jakes of what-if, it could have been real. The America of this story is a pair of third-world nations being supplied by two different superpowers--the Union gets their planes from the Germans and the Confederacy gets theirs from the British. Snoopy's Sopwith fighter is flown by Johnny Reb! I find it a poignant irony to be caught in the middle of this book by the World Trade Center attack on September 11 2001. Of all the books to be reading--a war book, even a fantasy one. This whole series has brought some strange perspectives on early 20th Century America. Southern black people going Communist--I thought that was a Ku Klux Klan fantasy about the Civil Rights struggle. But you get the wierd spectacle of Amos and Andy-style pronunciation of the canned Marxist jargon. Turtledove reminds us, though, that a lovely educated young Congresswoman of the Socialist persuasion doesn't really understand fully the very same rhetoric she herself is parroting. Blind zealotry knows no social or racial barriers, I guess. I'm lucky that I'm too much of a skeptic and cynic to be knee-jerk about my own ideologies--there but for the Grace of God go I! A wounded white Confederate soldier, a wounded black Confederate soldier and several wounded Union soldiers all wind up in the same hospital ward--talk about a micro-war in one room! But within a few days all of these men become introspective and self-analytical enough to be able shoot the bull like any bunch of fighting men. None of them has lost his prejudices, but they end up all treating each other like men. Hollywood is full of stories where a bunch of people magically overcome all of their biases before the end credits, which is naiive. I like Turtledove's treatment here of that issue much better--you have to walk before you can run.
Rating:
Summary: Ingenious
Review: A good story (or rather multiplicity of stories) told on a broad canvas. However, what fascinates me and what will make me buy the next series is the ingenious plot twist of a Confederate noncom veteran, embittered by an armistice and with a major axe to grind against both the powers that be and a minority race which he sees as the cause of most of the problems, deciding to go into politics in a minority party of which absolutely nobody has ever heard and discovering a talent for spellbinding, rabble-rousing oratory. Now, this could clearly never happen, to say, an Austrian noncom - could it? - but it's clever.
Rating:
Summary: Too Good For Words!!!
Review: This book is the crown jewel of the Great War Series. The battle scenes were epic, heroes rose and fell. I waited a whole year, from Summer of '99 to Summer of '00 for this book and it was worth the wait! Whenever a Great War book comes out, my life goes on hold until it gets read! This alternate history is so deviated from our own, yet so like our own in many ways. Make sure you read American Front and Walk in Hell first, but then get this one and strap yourself in for a helluva ride!
Rating:
Summary: A nice conclusion to the 'trilogy'.
Review: Breakthroughs is the fourth book in Turtledove's "Confederates won the Civil War" series, and the third in the "Great War" series based upon that. It's fairly typical Turtledove: nine or ten character threads, researched impeccably, no real plot outside of the passage of events. I like Turtledove's multi-threaded style, but it can get frustrating. The event-driven plot is viewed through almost a dozen characters, who have their own lives and their own adventures; really, it's like more than half a dozen books. I found myself skimming through parts of the book, wanting to see what happened next to X, not really caring about Y or Z. And at times I found myself mixing the characters up. Turtledove is a realist, not a dramatist. With a couple of brief exceptions, the character threads don't mix; one or two of them meet, but there's no convergence point. Events don't turn out as a writer would have them; they turn out as they would in the real world, where good people sometimes die and bad people profit. And where few people are either wholly good or unredeemably bad; this is an author who knows how to paint shades of grey. Overall, a good but not great book. Turtledove's writing isn't the best, but his characterization is first-rate. The overall image, too - of human flotsam being caught in the grand tide of events - is well done. Just one note: this isn't a stand-alone book. Read the first two before you start on Breakthroughs.
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Summary: When Johnny (Reb) Comes Marching Home...
Review: The cheerful "isn't-it-great-to-be-a-soldier" song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" derives from an older and rather darker tradition, songs with titles like "Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye" and "My Son John" -- bitter songs about young men who came home maimed. But it's the cheerful, cleaned-up versions like "...Marching Home" that those whose interests wars advance want us to remember because, if too many remember "Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye", the next war will be harder to start. As Turtledove brings his alternate World War One to a close, we can already see the seeds of the next war being sown, both in the specific activities of characters in this book and by parallels to the real history of the world. The treaties forced on the defeated Confederacy, intended to keep the CSA down and make sure it's bever again a threat and, as well, to humiliate it in return for all those years of humiliation that the USA has suffered will certainly bear the same bitter fruit that similar humiliating and devastating terms forced upon Germany bore. Certainly the Red devils (metaphorically) of revolution and politics released during the war will not easily be exprcised so long as the lot of the Black man is not materially improved, and (as another reviewer has pointed out) the embittered artillery Sergeant who has already begun keeping a journal chronicling his struggles and his thoughts on what is wrong with the System will very likely be Important in what is to come... Structurally, this book is pretty much the same as most of Turtledove's alternate history war novels -- the "Worldwar" books and the earlier ones in this series -- being recounted in a series of segments telling the actions and experiences of the members of a large cast of established characters (some entirely fictional, some alternates of real figures in history) whose viewpoints cover virtually all of the actions of the War and of the effects on those civilians who actually encounter its results {sort of like what John Brunner referred to as "Tracking With Closeups" in "Stand on Zanzibar"). The segments vary from quite short vignettes to near-short-story lengths and are not -- in my opinion -- necessarily all equally necessary to advance the story; there is a redundancy here and there that i could have done without. Another problem with the narrative technique that Turtledove has chosen, in my opinion, is that it tends to make it difficult to see the characters as people rather than as labelled cardboard figures. Thus, one is less likely to be less interested in their problems and their fates than one is in the overall sweep of the narrative. (Though, to be fair, that might be to some extent the author's intent.) A problem specific to this book is that, having moved his main character from the Birmingham Alabama area into battle, Turtledove doesn't go back there as much as he had been, and so we aren't seeing what conditions are evolvong there as more and more blacks are working in the mills and foundries, doing white man's work and drawing almost a white man's pay. Now that the whites are coming home, are those blacks going to go peacefully back to where they were before the War? A sustaining enough read, but, as in the Real World, it's just a place to mark time for a while, since the end of the "War To End War" merely sets the stage for the Next World War. Here's a frightening thought, given that in Turtledove's universe WW2 will be, to a major extent, fought between the CSA and the USA on the North American continent -- what if someone develops the atomic bomb?
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