Blood and Tears is a powerful autobiography set in the turbulent decade of 1940s Greece. Through the eyes of George Papavizas, an impressionable and intelligent young man who came of age in a time of war, foreign occupation, resistance, and civil war, we witness the tragedy and trauma suffered by an entire nation. While uniquely personal, this is also the story of the thousands of young Greek men and women cast unwillingly into the ambivalences and horrors of war and civil war. The author’s descriptions are vivid and convincing. Against a rigorously researched backdrop of the key historical events, we see youthful idealism being forcibly reconciled to the realities of hunger, brutality, dissension, and death. With a keen eye for detail, and reflecting on the mundane as well as the profound, we watch as Greece patriotically fends off foreign invasion and survives years of harsh occupation, but gullibly and disastrously succumbs to the blandishments of utopians.