A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Image by Lubos Houska, Pixabay Hello again and welcome to another installment of Bloggin' On, an occasional feature here in A Certain Point of View where I'll just prattle on about stuff that doesn't fall into the established categories of my blog (namely, reviews, political commentary, or updates about my literary or film projects). It's Friday, October 25, 2019, and it's a typically warm and muggy "fall" morning here in my corner of Florida. Currently, the temperature outside is 82℉ (28℃) under partly sunny skies. The humidity level is 85%, giving us an "endless summer" feels-like temperature of 91℉ (33℃). I' should try to get out and get fresh air and sunlight, but I'm not fond of humid heat, so I'll just stay indoors in the cool confines of my current domicile. So, what am I reading this month, you ask? Take a seat, relax, and enjoy your favorite beverage while I share my October reading list. Okay, so recently I finis...

© 2019 Rick Atkinson. ℗ 2019 Macmillan Audio  This is a review of the audiobook edition of Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-177, Volume One of the Revolution Trilogy. For a review of the print edition, please see:  Book Review: 'The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777' On July 4, 2019, the United States of America will celebrate its 243rd year, making the nation the oldest surviving federation in the world. As usual, millions of Americans will celebrate Independence Day in different ways; many will go to the beach, others will have backyard barbecues, while still others will watch The Capitol Fourth concert live on their local PBS station. And because it's a long-established tradition, Americans from coast to coast will ooh and aah over fireworks displays either in person or by watching coverage of the festivities on television. Some of the more historically minded...

© 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 ...

© 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 ...

© 2005 Picador Books. Book cover photo credit: © Benjamin Lowy When the U.S. 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the morning of March 20, 2003 as part of the Army's V Corps at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson was one of the media pool members "embedded" with Maj. Gen. David Petraeus' headquarters. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ( An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 )  was still a senior editor at the Post and was chosen to observe the legendary division that had participated in many famous campaigns since its creation as a parachute unit during the Second World War. Now, having traded in their airplanes for helicopters as far back as the Vietnam War, the Screaming Eagles were on their way north to Baghdad, 12 years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War. Atkinson was no stranger to either the Army or reporting about the military. His fa...

© 2003 Modern Library Books. Cover Designed by Wendy Lai. Illustration © Bettman/CORBIS On August 19, 2003, Modern Library, an imprint of publishing giant Random House, published the paperback edition of Grant S. Wood's The American Revolution: A History. As the title states, Wood's modest-sized work is a one-volume overview of the late colonial period in the 13 colonies on the East Coast of North America, the growing strains between the colonists and Great Britain, and the resulting War of Independence (1775-1781) and its aftermath.  Originally published in 2002 as a hardcover, Wood's book is not a detailed, blow-by-blow look at the quarter-century-long span between the end of the French and Indian War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. What readers will get instead is a scholarly (but still fascinating) summary of the economic, philosophical, and political forces that drove the Founding Fathers and about one third of the total population in Brit...

(C) 2009 Picador Books In 1989, when Rick Atkinson was on a leave of absence from his job as   a staff writer at the Washington Post, Houghton Mifflin published his first work of military history, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966. Based on a series of interviews with three West Point graduates of the titular Class of ’66, The Long Gray Line earned rave reviews for its intimate and often painful account of a handful of American boys who entered the U.S. Military Academy, endured the brutal hazing and harsh discipline of cadet life, and graduated during the Johnson Administration’s rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. James Salter, the Post’s book critic at the time, hailed The Long Gray Line as being “enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist’s brilliance.” Another contemporary reviewer, writing in Business Week, called Atkinson’s first major work of military history “the best book out of Vietnam to date." Two decades...