A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2019 Henry Holt and Company On Tuesday, May 14, Henry Holt and Company of New York published Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, the first volume in the author's The Revolution Trilogy. Using the same vivid, elegaic style he used so well in his previous works on American military history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Liberation Trilogy now turns his attention and storytelling skills to cover the Revolutionary War. In The British Are Coming, Atkinson tells the story of the first 21 months of the Revolution from the perspectives of the rebellious colonists and their British opponents. Starting with a nuanced look at the genesis of the traumatic break between Great Britain - a new globe-straddling empire upon which it was said that the sun never set - and 13 of its North American colonies, this new book treads on the familiar narrative of how London's well-intentioned attempts to pay the bills for ...

(C) 2013, Henry Holt and Co On October 22, 2013, Henry Holt and Co., a publishing company that operates under the umbrella of Macmillan Publishers, released the box set of  Rick Atkinson's  The Liberation Trilogy, a monumental account of how the Anglo-American alliance liberated Western Europe and helped usher in the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.  The trilogy consists of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 ; The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 ; and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 . Published over a period of 11 years, these works showcase some of the best historical writing about World War II since Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far came out in 1974.  (Want to read my reviews of the three books? Just click on the links you see on the preceding paragraph.) The definitive chronicle of the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II, Rick Atkinson's Liberation ...

www.liberationtrilogy.com For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in almost every aspect of the Second World War, partly because movies such as  The Sands of Iwo Jima  made the war seem like an exciting adventure with "good guys" and "bad guys,' but more importantly because as I grew older I realized that even though wars aren't something to be longed for, the conflict between the Allies and the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was one of the few justified clashes of arms of modern history, even if some of its causes were the result of bad decisions made by the victors of World War I. As I've grown older, I've noticed that non-fiction books about World War II have evolved from the almost propaganda-like  the Anglo-American Allies fought a brilliant campaign of liberation from 1942 to 1945 with an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and strategic savvy  to the more realistic view of  while the western alliance was one of the most succes...

In 2002, Rick Atkinson, a former staff writer and senior editor at the  Washington Post,  published the best-selling  An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943,  Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy. Critically acclaimed as “the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics,  The Longest Day  and  A Bridge Too Far, ”*  An Army at Dawn  won the Pulitzer Prize in history the following year. In  An Army at Dawn,  the author covers the trials and tribulations of the inexperienced U.S. Army and its allies in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as they sought to eject German and Italian forces from North Africa.   Five years later, Atkinson continued the saga of the Anglo-American campaigns against Nazi Germany in The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944.   Again, Atkinson’s account of the long and almost forgotten Mediterranean ventures against what Winston Churchill called “...