A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Art for the audiobook edition. (C) 1994 Greenhill Books (UK) and Stackpole Books (USA) Golden anniversaries of historical events are often a gold mine for publishers and writers alike, and 1994 - the 50th Anniversary of various famous World War II battles - was no exception. A small library's worth of new books about such engagements as the Battle for Normandy, Operation Market-Garden, and the Ardennes Counteroffensive (aka "The Battle of the Bulge") hit bookstores that year, along with re-issue editions of classics such as John Toland's The Last 100 Days, Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, and Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge.  Among the many D-Day books that were published in 1994 was the first edition of Peter G. Tsouras' Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944. Published in Great Britain by Greenhill Books and in the U.S. by Stackpole books, Disaster at D-Day is an alte...

Cover for the 1993 paperback edition. (C) 1993 HarTorch Books On May 26, 1992, Random House published the U.S. edition of Fatherland, the debut of novelist Robert Harris, formerly a writer and editor for the BBC and the newspaper The Observer. Previously known for his non-fiction works ( Gotcha! The Government, the Media, and the Falklands Crisis and Selling Hitler ), Harris went on to become aa author of novels, most of them which have historical themes. An "alternate history" work along the lines of Alfred Coppel's The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan, Fatherland depicts a dystopian version of Germany in 1964 as the victor of World War II in Europe. Set between April 14-20 in 1964, Fatherland begins with a murder investigation. Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) detective Xavier March is called to the shores of the Havel River on the outskirts of Hitler's redesigned (by his favorite architect, Albert Speer) capital of Berlin. A corpse of an elder...

Cover of the 2000 50th Anniversary Edition. (C) 2000 Da Capo Press On March 21, 1994, Da Capo Press published Robert J. Dvorchak's The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War, a "coffee table" hardcover book about the 1950-1953 Korean War. Based primarily on reporting by AP correspondents and featuring more than 300 photographs from the venerable news service's archives,  The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War' s first edition hit bookstores a year after the 40th anniversary of the signing of the July 1953 armistice that ended three years of combat on the divided peninsula that lies perilously close to three powerful neighbors: China, Russia, and Japan. Long forgotten by most Americans and famously ignored by popular culture except for a handful of movies ( The Hunters, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Pork Chop Hill, and Battle Hymn )  and the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, the Korean War is also a conflict tha...

(C) 2009 Viking/Penguin Books On October 13, 2009, Viking Penguin (the U.S. imprint of Britain's Penguin Books) published D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by historian Antony Beevor. Billed as "the first major account in more than 20 years to cover the invasion from June 6, 1944, up to the liberation of Paris on August 25," Beevor's 608-page tome joins the ranks of other classic works about the Allied campaign to liberate northern France, including Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (1959), Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day & the Battle for Normandy (1984) , and Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.  Beevor, formerly a lieutenant in the British Army who studied under Professor John Keegan ( Six Armies in Normandy ) at Sandhurst as a young cadet, had written several books about World War II and one about the Spanish Civil War before he tackled Operation Overlord; most of his previous work either focused on the ...

(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by  Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward  detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South.  The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for...

Inning 6: The National Pastime  (1940-1950) Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns In Europe, in the Pacific, on the homefront, both African-Americans and whites fight to make the world safe for democracy. When the war ends, Major League Baseball becomes, in fact, what it has always claimed to be: the national pastime. But, at the beginning of the decade, Jackie Robinson's debut is still some years away. Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio sets a consecutive game-hitting streak that still stands. Ted Williams becomes the last man to hit .400. The once-lowly Brooklyn Dodgers win their first pennant. And World War II takes so much talent from the majors that the St. Louis Browns win a pennant.  24 years ago, fans of Major League Baseball in the U.S. and elsewhere were in a funk. For much of the late summer and early fall, a strike had frozen the 1994 baseball season as the players' union and MLB team owners grappled over - what else - salary caps and revenue sharing. After a...

Cover art by Ernie Chan. (C) 1978 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corp.  Photo Credit: Wookieepedia I was 15 years old and still getting used to living in a new townhouse in a still-new development called East Wind Lake Village in unincorporated Dade County when I first saw a copy of Marvel Comics' Marvel Special Edition #3: Featuring Star Wars. Even 40 years later, I can recall with startling clarity walking into the neighborhood's Top Banana - a convenience store owned and operated by Miami-based Farm Stores, a company famous for its drive-thru convenience stores. This particular Top Banana was only a few blocks away from the new townhouse, and every so often Mom would ask me to walk there to buy a gallon of milk or a pint of Farm Stores ice cream. Like many convenience stores, the Top Banana at the Blue Grotto shopping plaza had a large magazine display stand next to the cashier station, and in addition to the usual mix of issues of Time, People, TV Guide, and...

Cover of the paperback edition of Six Frigates.   (C) 2008 W.W. Norton & Company On October 17, 2006, W.W. Norton & Company published Ian W. Toll's Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. In its 500+ pages, Toll (a former political speechwriter and financial analyst) tells the incredible story of the founding of the United States Navy during the Presidential tenures of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Set in the tumultuous early years of the Republic, Six Frigates follows the events and personalities that led to the appropriation, construction, and eventual deployment of the Navy's first post-Revolutionary War frigates: USS United States, USS Constellation, USS Constitution, USS Chesapeake, USS Congress, and USS President.  Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military became the most divisive issue facing the new government. The founders―particularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adams―debated...

On September 15, 1996, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired The People,  the first of eight episodes of director Stephen Ives' The West, a documentary about the United States' westward expansion and its effects on the history and culture of various peoples, including Americans, Native Americans, Spanish, French, Mexicans, and African Americans. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan, The West  was executive produced by Ken Burns and produced under the aegis of Burns' Florentine Films and Ives' own Insignia Films production company. The West was narrated by actor Peter Coyote, who would later provide narration for later documentaries by Ken Burns, including The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, and The Vietnam War.  Presented by Ken Burns and directed by Stephen Ives, this 12-hour film chronicles the epic saga of America's most vast and turbulent region, beginning before European settlement and continuing into the 20th Century. ...

(C) 2018 CBS Studios/Paramount Home Media Distribution On November 13, Paramount Home Media Distribution released Star Trek: Discovery - Season One, a four-disc Blu-ray set of the newest television series in the Star Trek franchise. Created by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman for the streaming service CBS All Access, Star Trek: Discovery is the seventh television series set in the universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s and the first new show to premiere since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. Although it was co-created by Kurtzman, one of the writers of 2009's Star Trek feature film, Star Trek: Discovery is not set in the Kelvin timeline in which the current feature films are set. Rather, the new show's setting is the Prime timeline seen in all the other television series. Like Enterprise, Star Trek: Discovery is a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series, but its tale takes place a decade before the five-year mission of Capt. James T. Kirk...