Book Review: 'D-Day and the Battle for Normandy'
(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 ...