| Notable Books of
Military History
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Flags of Our Fathers James Bradley, Ron Powers. Bantam Books, Incorporated / May 2000. BN Price: $14.97 In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. Flags of Our Fathers is one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see, in part because it is instructive and moving in unexpected ways. On one level, Mr. Bradley has composed a touching eulogy to his father, one that honors him precisely for those qualities that did not earn him fame and recognition on Iwo Jima. He has also forged an unforgettable tableau of one of the most savage battlefields in history, a battlefield of wholesale death, mutilation and waste. Beyond that he has produced an arresting meditation on the nature of heroism, the public perception of it, and the unbridgeable chasm between the two. |
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The Greatest
Generation Tom Brokaw. Random House, Incorporated / November 1998. BN Price: $14.97 Since 1983, Tom Brokaw has been broadcasting the national news as the sole anchor and editor of "NBC Nightly News." Now, with his book The Greatest Generation, Brokaw goes out into America to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and WWII. This generation, united by a common purpose, went on to build modern America. In his book, Brokaw introduces people whose everyday lives reveal how a generation persevered through war, were trained by it, and then went on to create interesting and useful lives and the America we have today. |
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Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the
War Bob Greene. Morrow,William & Co / May 2000. BN Price: $20.00 Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world - and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty - lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life. |
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The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II Stephen E. Ambrose. Simon & Schuster Publishing, Incorporated / September 1998. BN Price: $5.98 From America's pre-eminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, 11 months later, on May 7, 1945. This authoritative narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive and comprehensive D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, about which the great Civil War historian James McPherson wrote: 'If there is a better book about the experience of GIs who fought in Europe during World War II, I have not read it.' |
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The Art of War Sun Tzu,Ralph D. Sawyer (Translator). Barnes & Noble Books / January 1994. BN Price: $7.98 Written approximately twenty-five hundred years ago, in a time of political turbulence and great military activity, Sun Tzu's The Art of War has exerted an extraordinary influence on the modern world. People of all persuasions have found inspiration and sound, practical guidance here for any number of activities that require strategy, from sports and normal business affairs to affairs of the heart. They have found the courage to view the world in which they live and work as a network of actual and potential combat zones, where the stakes are high and struggle is the primary mode of being; where no one is to be trusted and survival depends on unconditional victory. This edition, augmented by commentaries and anecdotal material, renders the classic text accessible to the contemporary reader, while maintaining the spare, near-poetic tone of the original. |
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The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History Peter Maas. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated / August 2000. BN Price: $4.89 It is the eve of World War II. America's newest submarine lies flooded in the depths of the North Atlantic. Miraculously, 33 crewmen are still alive. Their fate rests in the hands of one man—Swede Momsen—a visionary, scientist, and a man of action. A submariner himself, Momsen has risked his own life in inventing every escape and rescue device that could save those submariners, but none has ever been used in an actual disaster. |
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My War Andy A. Rooney, Foreword by Tom Brokaw. PublicAffairs, LLC / October 2000. BN Price: $14.00 This is a memoir of Rooney's "World War II days as a reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes." One of America's favorite commentators writes a moving, funny, and highly evocative account of his life as an Army private and Stars and Stripes reporter during World War II. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, My War features endpapers showing dispatches and photos taken during the war. |
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The First World War John Keegan. Knopf Alfred A. / May 2000. BN Price: $14.40 The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. |
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Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War Mark Bowden / February 2000. BN Price: $12.55 The behind-the-lines story of the U.S. Special Forces team dropped into the middle of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and the intense firefight for their lives they went through. A true-to-life thriller that gives the political story of what U.S. troops were doing there in the first place and the military details of what the streetfighting cost both sides. |
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Compiled by: Bob Cole |