A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2014 HarperCollins (Reissue cover) In 1984, Simon & Schuster published the first edition of Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, a book that re-examined the Allied invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944 and the bitter campaign that lasted two-and-a-half months and culminated with the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944. Based on extensive research, hundreds of interviews with veterans and other eyewitnesses, and benefitting from new insights gleaned from the declassification of the "Ultra secret  - the long-concealed fact that the Allies had broken the Germans' "unbreakable" Enigma cypher codes - Hastings' book sought to look beyond the legends and myths that had surrounded Operation Overlord and explain how the Allies defeated the German Wehrmacht in Normandy despite a "quality gap" in weapons (except artillery and aircraft), training, tactics, and overall soldiering skills that favored the Germans. At the ...

Cover designed by Kristen Haff. © 2014 Penguin Books The Battle of Crete - the first large-scale military engagement conceived and executed by airborne forces in history - has long been overshadowed by other World War II battles that took place in 1941. Planned by Luftwaffe General Kurt Student (the "Father of Germany's Airborne Force") and approved by a reluctant Adolf Hitler, Operation Mercury was a daring if rather risky endeavor: the capture of the Greek island of Crete by a large airborne force that was to be reinforced primarily via an "air bridge" from the mainland and only tangentially by a seaborne force embarked on a modest flotilla of caiques. Hitler greenlit Unternehmen Merkur almost at the last minute with one proviso: that the invasion of Crete be carried out with resources available in the Greek theater of operations and not much else lest it interfered with the Fuhrer's larger plan to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The staff ...

(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) 2018 Quirk Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) When I used to post regularly at the late and unlamented “writing” site Bubblews, I often shared short lists of movies I watched, albums I listened to, or books that I read. If I remember correctly, my summer reading list for 2013 was one of my most popular Bubblews posts.  Why this was so I’m not sure; perhaps because it was a list and  not  a comparatively complex article or review. (Not that I ever wrote anything at Bubblews that requires a master’s degree in English to comprehend, but most people on the Internet tend to shun complex articles or reviews. That’s just how the world is nowadays.) I was going to post a review today, but I haven't felt very creative or passionate enough to get to do that, so here's another reading list instead. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions,  Randall Munroe Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges 1944,  Antony Beevor The Fleet at Flood...

Operation Market, the airborne element of Market-Garden. Official British Army photo.  On May 17, 2018, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, published the UK edition of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. In this eighth work about the Second World War, the award-winning writer and historian turns his sights on one of the War’s most controversial battles – Operation Market-Garden. Outside of the professional military world – especially in the airborne community – Operation Market-Garden was better-known in Great Britain than in the U.S. until the summer of 1974. That’s when Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far was published and gave U.S. readers their first real look at the Allies’ ill-fated attempt to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind the German front lines in Nazi-occupied Holland to capture a series of bridges “with thunderclap surprise” and allow elements of the British Second Army to drive up a single highway, grab a bridgehead over the Lower ...

Dust jacket illustration for the U.S. edition of Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. Design by Matt Yee. (C) 2015 Viking (a Penguin Random House imprint) On November 3, 2015, Penguin Random House UK imprint Viking published Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble , a book by historian Antony Beevor about the biggest battle fought in Western Europe during World War II. Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the engagement that began on December 16, 1944 and ended six weeks later is better known by its more popular nomenclature – the Battle of the Bulge. (The battle earned its nickname due to the bulge-shaped salient in Allied lines on situation maps – official and those published in U.S. and British newspapers during that cold, miserable, and violent winter battle.) Published in the U.S. as Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, the book is Beevor’s first World War II book that focuses on a campaign that was overwhelmingly a struggle between Adolf Hitler’s We...

(C) 2003 Penguin Books For over 60 years, the narrative of the last chaotic months of World War II in Europe has been dominated by the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the spring of 1945. The last 100 days of the war against Nazi Germany were full of drama and tragedy for soldiers and civilians on both the Western and Eastern Fronts as the Allied and Soviet armies attacked Hitler’s battered armies. But even as the anti-Nazi coalition was on the verge of certain victory, dissension between the Anglo-American allies and their Soviet counterparts planted the seeds of a new conflict – the Cold War. Since the 1960s, many authors – including Cornelius Ryan and John Toland – have covered the tumultuous events that led to Hitler’s downfall in books such as “The Last Battle” and “The Last 100 Days.” These books, which are based on eyewitness accounts by military and civilian participants, follow the “you are there” style popularized in Ryan’s classic 195...