A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(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 Tri

Pros: Strong narrative, a fine tribute to a theater overshadowed by the Normandy invasion Cons: A bit mawkish at times The Bottom Line: The second entry of The Liberation Trilogy has its literary flaws at times, but it really gives readers a good look at the war in Sicily and Italy. When most people who aren't into military history much or have learned just the basics about World War II in high school history classes think about the war, more likely than not they'll recall the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the D-Day landings on northern France, or the Battle of the Bulge. If they are serious war movie buffs, they might even mention the Battle of the Atlantic (via such films as  The Enemy Below, Das Boot,  or  U-571 ), the Battle of Britain, or the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. If the air war over Gernany, the Battle of the Atlantic and the campaign to liberate Northwest Europe have overshadowed the long, bloody, and often frus

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 “the soft underbelly of the Axis” earned critical and commercial succe