A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2017 Public Broadcasting Service & WGBH Boston On November 11, not too long ago, many countries around the world, including the major European powers and the United States of America, observed the Centennial of the end of the First World War, the bloody conflict that began in the summer of 1914 and ended on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. Fought primarily in Europe but also in other theaters around the world, this calamitous conflict claimed more than 30 million lives and sowed the seeds of other wars and global rivalries that continue to affect our lives in the 21st Century. At the time, the clash of arms that began with the assassination of an Austrian nobleman in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 went by many names. Optimists dubbed it "The war to end all wars" Some German writers called it Der Weltkrieg (the World War). Most people of the time, including Americans, simply called it "The Great War." In the 19...

What is a good counter-argument to “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns”? The best counter-argument is this: Even if thousands of Jews had access to rifles, shotguns, and pistols of the era, they still would not have defeated professionally trained, professionally-led mechanized German forces. It’s elementary. The Germans would have made mincemeat of a Jewish militia. They would have suffered losses, as they certainly did during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. But the Germans had tanks, planes, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery. The Jews did not. Also, consider: the victims of the Holocaust were not exclusively young men of military age in good health with access to firearms. They were civilians, and millions of them were elderly, children, and women. And it’s not like they had the ways and means to organize and arm themselves to form an organized resistance in several European nations occupied by the Germans and other Axis powers. That’s wh...

Art for the audiobook edition. (C) 1994 Greenhill Books (UK) and Stackpole Books (USA) Golden anniversaries of historical events are often a gold mine for publishers and writers alike, and 1994 - the 50th Anniversary of various famous World War II battles - was no exception. A small library's worth of new books about such engagements as the Battle for Normandy, Operation Market-Garden, and the Ardennes Counteroffensive (aka "The Battle of the Bulge") hit bookstores that year, along with re-issue editions of classics such as John Toland's The Last 100 Days, Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, and Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge.  Among the many D-Day books that were published in 1994 was the first edition of Peter G. Tsouras' Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944. Published in Great Britain by Greenhill Books and in the U.S. by Stackpole books, Disaster at D-Day is an alte...

Cover for the 1993 paperback edition. (C) 1993 HarTorch Books On May 26, 1992, Random House published the U.S. edition of Fatherland, the debut of novelist Robert Harris, formerly a writer and editor for the BBC and the newspaper The Observer. Previously known for his non-fiction works ( Gotcha! The Government, the Media, and the Falklands Crisis and Selling Hitler ), Harris went on to become aa author of novels, most of them which have historical themes. An "alternate history" work along the lines of Alfred Coppel's The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan, Fatherland depicts a dystopian version of Germany in 1964 as the victor of World War II in Europe. Set between April 14-20 in 1964, Fatherland begins with a murder investigation. Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) detective Xavier March is called to the shores of the Havel River on the outskirts of Hitler's redesigned (by his favorite architect, Albert Speer) capital of Berlin. A corpse of an elder...

Cover of the 2000 50th Anniversary Edition. (C) 2000 Da Capo Press On March 21, 1994, Da Capo Press published Robert J. Dvorchak's The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War, a "coffee table" hardcover book about the 1950-1953 Korean War. Based primarily on reporting by AP correspondents and featuring more than 300 photographs from the venerable news service's archives,  The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War' s first edition hit bookstores a year after the 40th anniversary of the signing of the July 1953 armistice that ended three years of combat on the divided peninsula that lies perilously close to three powerful neighbors: China, Russia, and Japan. Long forgotten by most Americans and famously ignored by popular culture except for a handful of movies ( The Hunters, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Pork Chop Hill, and Battle Hymn )  and the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, the Korean War is also a conflict tha...

(C) 2009 Viking/Penguin Books On October 13, 2009, Viking Penguin (the U.S. imprint of Britain's Penguin Books) published D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by historian Antony Beevor. Billed as "the first major account in more than 20 years to cover the invasion from June 6, 1944, up to the liberation of Paris on August 25," Beevor's 608-page tome joins the ranks of other classic works about the Allied campaign to liberate northern France, including Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (1959), Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day & the Battle for Normandy (1984) , and Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.  Beevor, formerly a lieutenant in the British Army who studied under Professor John Keegan ( Six Armies in Normandy ) at Sandhurst as a young cadet, had written several books about World War II and one about the Spanish Civil War before he tackled Operation Overlord; most of his previous work either focused on the ...

(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by  Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward  detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South.  The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for...