A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

British cover of Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France. Note the shorter subtitle.     © 2019 Griffon Merlin Ltd On June 4, 2019, Grove Atlantic's Atlantic Press Monthly published James Holland's Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France (published by Griffon Merlin Ltd in Britain as  Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France ), a new history of what the late Stephen E. Ambrose called "the climactic battle of World War II." The timing of the book's publication was. as the British expression puts it, "bang on." Two days after the book hit bookstore shelves or was sent to customers who bought it on Amazon and other online stores as pre-orders, most of the West (including the U.S., Canada,  France, Great Britain, and their former enemy, Germany) observed the 75th Anniversary of D-Day and the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Holland, who produces, writes, and narrates BBC

The cover for the British edition of Big Week.  © 2018 Penguin Books (UK) and Atlantic Monthly Press (a Penguin subsidiary)  On November 6, 2018, the Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Britain's Penguin publishing empire, released the U.S. edition of  Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II.  Its British counterpart, Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War Two, had been published almost three months earlier (on August 6) and was a best-seller in Great Britain. Written by historian and BBC TV presenter James Holland, the 400-page book tells the story of the Anglo-American air forces' struggle to achieve air supremacy over Western Europe as a necessary pre-requisite for Operation Overlord, the planned Allied cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France, which was scheduled to take place in May of 1944. As the book's title implies, Big Week focuses on Operation Argument, a series of air strikes by American and British bombers against Nazi Germa