One could fill a fair-sized library with books about the Second World War, a historical event that has something for everyone: exciting battles, great wartoys, Nazis, Captain America, Mrs. Miniver, kamikazes, and the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.  Books about that war's aftermath are comparatively scarce, as most people assume there was no real drama in the postwar period except, perhaps, for the superpower sparring that initiated the Cold War.  Author Keith Lowe observes that, in Europe at least, this was far from the truth.  Savage Continent reminds readers of something Eastern Europeans, at least, have known for many years: Europe remained a land of violence and misery until the early 1950s.  Frenchmen ritually humiliated and sometimes killed collaborators; northern Italians slaughtered them by the hundreds.  Allied soldiers routinely neglected and abused German POWs, resulting in the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Western custody – and over a million in Soviet custody.  Poles and Czechs expelled and murdered ethnic Germans, victorious Yugoslav Partisans gunned down Chetnik prisoners, Greeks killed one another in a bloody civil war, and Baltic and Ukrainian "forest brothers" killed several thousand Soviet soldiers and civilians into the 1950s.  If nothing else, Lowe's detailed and fast-paced account should help demonstrate that war breeds more violence, just as the American Civil War led to the political warfare of the Reconstruction era and World War One led (ultimately) to World War Two.  In his conclusion, however, the author gives some small cause for hope, observing that the two countries who started the war, Germany and Poland, were able to reconcile their differences through diplomacy and education in the early 1970s.  War isn't necessarily followed by peace, but it doesn't have to lead to more war, either.