A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Recently, novelist Harry Turtledove, the acclaimed author of Ruled Britannia, The Guns of the South, and many other alternate history stories, shared a whimsical Tweet with his followers which he titled #70sChristmasList: Harvest gold refrigerator Avocado stove Betamax Quadraphonic sound system English Leather, or maybe Brut Cargo pants for the guys Hot pants for the women Platform shoes A leisure suit A case of Miller Lite Or of US-brewed (aka ruined) Löwenbräu Taking inspiration from Mr. Turtledove and his amusing Tweet, I decided that I'd revisit the past four decades' worth of Christmases past and share my typical wish lists for each, starting with the 1970s and ending with the 2010s.  As I've pointed out in my previous posts in this series, these aren't real Christmas lists that I wrote and passed around. Indeed, I often bought most of the items herein, although on occasion I did get a few of them as presents during the holidays or for my birthday.  ...

(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...

(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 ...

www.liberationtrilogy.com For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in almost every aspect of the Second World War, partly because movies such as  The Sands of Iwo Jima  made the war seem like an exciting adventure with "good guys" and "bad guys,' but more importantly because as I grew older I realized that even though wars aren't something to be longed for, the conflict between the Allies and the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was one of the few justified clashes of arms of modern history, even if some of its causes were the result of bad decisions made by the victors of World War I. As I've grown older, I've noticed that non-fiction books about World War II have evolved from the almost propaganda-like  the Anglo-American Allies fought a brilliant campaign of liberation from 1942 to 1945 with an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and strategic savvy  to the more realistic view of  while the western alliance was one of the most succes...

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 ofte...

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 “...