A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art by Home Box Office, Inc. (C) 2010 NAL Caliber Books   Pros:  Interesting concept; vivid anecdotes; compelling characters Cons:  None After the phenomenal success of their HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers,  executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turned to their friend Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the book they had just adapted for TV, and started thinking about future World War II projects they could collaborate on. The Second World War, after all, was a topic Ambrose knew backwards and forwards from his stint as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's official biographer and his subsequent career as a history professor. Ike had - before entering politics in 1952 - been one of America's top generals during the war, rising to the title of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and five-star general before the end of hostilities in 1945, so it was not a stretch for Ambrose to pen several best-selling books about the U.S. ...

(C) 1992 Penguin Books  Pros: Fascinating study of one of the most famous - and toughest - World War II battles. Cons: None. On August 7, 1942, eight months to the day after Japan's "dastardly attack" on Pearl Harbor and barely eight weeks after the Battle of Midway ended a 6-month-long string of defeats for the Allies in the Pacific, elements of the First Marine Division, supported by the largest U.S. fleet yet assembled, came ashore on the beaches of Guadalcanal and two nearby islands in a barely opposed initial landing. Their mission: to capture an airfield (which the Marines named Henderson Field, in honor of Maj. Lofton Henderson, who had died at Midway) that, if left in Japanese hands, could have helped cut the lifeline between Australia and the United States. The initial success of the landings, however, was followed by some of the fiercest land, air, and naval battles of the Pacific War. Japanese and American naval forces struggled ince...

(C) 1991 Warner Books When the late historian Gordon W. Prange and his two co-authors, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, set out to write At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor , they realized that they had too much material for one book. The Pearl Harbor story, after all, is so vast and complex that, even without the ill-advised revisionist accounts and conspiracy theories that have become a cottage industry, one volume isn't enough to convey to a contemporary reader the import and impact that the "Day of Infamy" had -- and continues to have -- on American history and foreign policy. Indeed, after Prange's sudden death in May 1980, Goldstein and Dillon not only finished At Dawn We Slept , but followed that best-selling volume with four related books ( Miracle at Midway, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, Target: Tokyo, and Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. ) which delved deeper into topics that At Dawn W...

(C) 1992 Da Capo Press The Mighty Endeavor: The American War in Europe (1992) (Originally published in 1969 as The Mighty Endeavor: American Armed Forces in the European Theater in World War II ) By Charles B. MacDonald Dawn reached slowly into the Huertgen Forest, as if reluctant to throw light on a stark tableau that it seemed only the devil himself could have created. Once magnificent trees were now twisted, gashed, broken, their limbs and foliage forming a thick carpet on the floor of the forest. Some trees stood like gaunt, outsized toothpicks. Great jagged chunks of concrete and twisted reinforcing rods that together had been a pillbox. The mutilated carcass of a truck that had hit a mine. Everywhere discarded soldier equipment – gas masks, empty rations containers, helmets, rifles, here a field jacket with a sleeve rent, there a muddy overcoat with an ugly clotted dark stain on it. One man kicked a bloody shoe from his path, then shuddered to see that the s...

In 1981, shortly after my maternal grandmother died, my Mom traveled to Bogota, Colombia to help her brother and sister clear out my grandparents’ apartment and divide some heirlooms among themselves. My aunt Martha and uncle Octavio ended up taking way more than two thirds of the apartment’s contents; they lived in Bogota and had definitely more kids than Mom, so it just made logistical sense for my mother to only claim two pieces of Grandma’s antique furniture for herself, some family pictures and a ring for my older sister and a few books – in English – from my grandfather’s library for me. Though two of the books were paperback editions of tomes published before 1977 (the year of my grandfather’s death), one of them was a small and thin hardcover with no dust jacket.  It looked – as many of my grandfather’s books did – well-cared for and had that indescribable but pleasant “old book” smell, and on the spine it said  A Bell for Adano – John Hersey.   (It ...

(C) 1999 Bison Books Pros:  Very  readable. Written just 15 years after battle, the account is vivid. Cons:  Missing part of the overall story due to still-existing classification issues. Fog hung thick in the Schnee Eifel on the morning of December 16. The men of the Tank Artillery Regiment of the 1st SS Panzer Division, "Hitler's Own," were tense with excitement. "All batteries ready to fire!" came the report. On a nearby road, tanks of the division were lined up for the attack like a great winding dragon. A commander waved to the man standing in the turret of the next tank. "Goodbye, Lieutenant, see you in America!" The lieutenant laughed. Final checks were made on the range finders. Throats were dry, hands were poised at the lanyards, eyes fixed on watches. Up and down the line the arms of gunnery officers were raised. It was 5:30 A.M. "Fire!" An eruption of flame and smoke burst all along the Ghost Front. For eighty-...

(C) 2007, Alfred A. Knopf On September 23, 2007, PBS aired A Necessary War,  Episode One of Ken Burns' seven-part series The War. Co-written by Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, The War is a 14-hour look at World War II and how it affected the U.S. through the experiences of four geographically-distributed towns in America - Luverne, Minnesota; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; and Sacramento, California. 12 days earlier, Alfred A. Knopf had published a companion book, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945. The 408-page hardcover was co-written by Ward ( Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882-1905 ) and filmmaker Burns. (Ward and Burns have co-written five books and collaborated on many documentaries since 1990's The Civil War, including Baseball, Jazz, Prohibition, and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. ) The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who...