With the discerning eye of an experienced war correspondent, Ryan draws a picture of this massive WWII undertaking that turned into a tragic Allied disaster despite the courage and heroism required by the many thousands of men in the field.
The pathos and futility, so masterly portrayed, stay with you long after you have closed the book and returned it to your bookshelf.
The unforgivable waste of war brought to mind my father’s stories of his WWII desert campaign as the doctor of a Gurkha Battalion in the British Indian Army, making this story a very personal one for me.
Against all odds, women journalists have built a robust tradition of telling the truth and getting to the heart of the story no matter the obstacles. In a world where the Fourth Estate is ever more crucial, the history of female reporters is all the more relevant as a source of information and inspiration for the next generation of correspondents. As a woman’s historian and passionate supporter of freedom of the press I’m always on the lookout for great histories of these intrepid reporters whose lives also happen to make for great reads.
What can I say? I cried more than a few times reading Lindsey Hilsum’s humanizing and deeply personal biography of Marie Colvin. Hilsum’s brilliant portrait paints a figure that burns a little too brightly with life to live long in this world of ours.
She took her first reporting job with UPI and then transferred to the Sunday Times where she garnered the Sunday Times where she garnered the reputation of the kind of reporter who could get stories that no one else could. She was the first to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Hilsum’s heart-pounding description put me right in the bunker with her as she nervously clicked on her tape recorder for the interview under the watchful gaze of several armed guards. From there, Colvin covered some of the 1990s' most consequential combat zones, reflecting the chaos that ensued from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In…
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Finalist for the Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Named a Best Book of 2018 by Esquire and Foreign Policy. An Amazon Best Book of November, the Guardian Bookshop Book of November, and one of the Evening Standard's Books to Read in November
"Now, thanks to Hilsum’s deeply reported and passionately written book, [Marie Colvin] has the full accounting that she deserves." --Joshua Hammer, The New York Times
The inspiring and devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed…
I grew up during the war years and remembered the backouts, ration cards, and the newscasts from the front and worrying about my cousins who were in the middle of it. My cousin Gerald always made sure I had a model airplane kit every Christmas, even though he was fighting in Europe. As a journalist, I was lucky to work with a few war correspondents that covered Dieppe and D-Day and heard what they went through. One of those people was Bill Anderson who died two years ago. I recorded a video interview of him when he was still 97 about his experiences in Canada and Europe
Shapiro, a Canadian war correspondent, landed with the troops on the beaches on D-Day and his other experiences rise to the surface in his novel about life during the blitz and the events leading up to D-Day. Shapiro always considered his a historical novel. His descriptions are those of someone who lived the tale. The hero is a U.S. soldier who found himself deeply in love with an English woman. This book came out a few years after the war when the war was fresh in our minds. It was like reliving those wonderful days all over again.
The Sixth of June tells the story of American soldier Brad Parker, who joins the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. When he arrives in London, he meets lonely Valerie Russell, and they fall in love despite their loyalties to wife and future husband. Although they are certain that their love could overcome every obstacle, everything changes after the Normandy Invasion.
I came across this via a couple of keywords I typed into Google Books as part of my research for an abortive World War II-related nonfiction book. Up popped a reference to Studio Europe, which turned out to be a wonderful 1945 memoir by an American artist who travelled to Europe to draw the conflict.
His quickfire sketches complement his intensely atmospheric, witty, and compassionate account of his experiences. I can’t understand why this fantastic book never seems to be referenced in books about the war.
I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.
This is a book I wish I had written, far and away the best book about coverage of the Second World War in Europe.
It is based on a wealth of archival research and features both celebrated reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow, and less well-known ones like Homer Bigart and Don Whitehead. Although award-winning scholarship, Casey’s work is accessible to any curious reader. Casey is English but understands well the American military, the American press, and American culture generally.
Casey explores the war in the Pacific theater in a subsequent book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan.
From the North African desert to the bloody stalemate in Italy, from the London blitz to the D-Day beaches, a group of highly courageous and extremely talented American journalists reported the war against Nazi Germany for a grateful audience. Based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, War Beat, Europe provides the first comprehensive account of what these reporters witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American history.
In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative, Steven Casey takes readers from the inner councils…
I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.
I first encountered Ed Kennedy while doing research in the AP archives and have spent the better part of a decade untangling what proved to be the biggest controversy over press coverage of the war—Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender.
No American war correspondent was more experienced than Kennedy, who reported for the Associated Press from the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II.
Given that Kennedy acted as an AP bureau chief in both North Africa and Paris, his memoir, written in the late 1940s but not published for sixty years, is the best insider account we have at how American reporters interacted with army public relations and censorship officials during the war.
On May 7, 1945, Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy became the most famous -- or infamous -- American correspondent of World War II. On that day in France, General Alfred Jodl signed the official documents as the Germans surrendered to the Allies. Army officials allowed a select number of reporters, including Kennedy, to witness this historic moment -- but then instructed the journalists that the story was under military embargo. In a courageous but costly move, Kennedy defied the military embargo and broke the news of the Allied victory. His scoop generated instant controversy. Rival news organisations angrily protested, and…
While I was child growing up in London, the war was a powerful presence in my life. It was there in the films we watched, in the comics my brothers read, and in my vague understanding of what it meant to be British. It was not a subject we ever studied at school and as an adult I’ve always felt frustrated by my inadequate knowledge of this world-changing conflict. When I first had the idea of writing about the six remarkable women who pioneered the way for female war journalists, it wasn’t just their personal stories that drew me in but the chance to learn more about WW2 itself.
Some readers may know about the late great Martha Gellhorn through her dramatically volatile relationship with the novelist Ernest Hemingway. But she was a fierce and passionate writer of fiction herself, and when I discovered her collection of war journalism I realised that she ranked and still ranks amongst the finest of war correspondents. Even decades after the event, Gellhorn still has the power to shock and move us. By choosing to put the suffering of individuals at the heart of her writing, by the unflinching detail of her descriptions, evoking the sights, smells, and sensations of war she drives home her own profound conviction that while the fight against fascism had been necessary in her time, war itself is nearly always an evil, driven by the cynicism and greed of powerful old men.
A collection of “first-rate frontline journalism” from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America “by a woman singularly unafraid of guns” (Vanity Fair).
For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn’s fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn’s candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn’s writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline…
I am a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California, reporting news from Asia since 1978 and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. My work, including this book, has taken me to Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, New York, and elsewhere. Fragments of people and their distant voices are the behavior and quotes that inspire. Slices, starting at random moments and ending in bleak locations, fascinate and hypnotize. And transcribing handwritten notes, impressions, and exclusive interviews, create my RocknRolla lyrics.
The fiercely independent spirit of surrealists and other people trying to survive during World War 2 permeates this opulent novel with ghostly quotes and rebellious beliefs.
Laced with angels, forests, dreams, and women, this diary becomes increasingly fraught with questions of obedience, patriotism, dictatorship, and freedom.
Will your own perceptions be radicalized or soothed by this war story?
Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean "Tom o'Bedlam" ("By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end / Methinks it is no journey..."), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic…
I am a professor of history who specializes in the United States and the Cold War. A large part of my job involves choosing books that are informative, but that the students will actually want to read. That means I often select novels, memoirs, and works of history that have compelling figures or an entertaining narrative. After more than twenty years of teaching, I’ve assigned many different books in my classes. These are the ones that my students enjoyed the most.
I find myself re-reading this book every few years. As someone who has visited Vietnam several times, I am particularly drawn to Greene’s vivid descriptions of the country in the early 1950s. The symbolism in the novel is not subtle: an older Brit and a younger American are rivals for the affection of a Vietnamese woman.
I find Greene’s depiction of Pyle, the American, to be especially striking: well-meaning but ultimately unaware of the damage he is doing to the country.
Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam
"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.
As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But…
I am fascinated by the question, “Where is home?” Is it the place you were born, among the people who raised you? Or is it the place you most come alive? Growing up, fiction taught me there were other worlds than the one I inhabited, and historical fiction taught me how they came to be. Travels in England, Europe, Africa, and South America opened up worlds and cultures I had only read about and drove me to write a novel about how one may find "home" in the most unlikely times and places.
I am fascinated by stories that encapsulate a whole life, usually from the perspective of a character looking back, assessing, wondering, and coming to terms with all that has transpired, both personally and globally. I am particularly fascinated by multi-dimensional female characters.
I was taken from page one by how well this story transitioned through different perspectives to offer a kaleidoscopic view of a life lived by a strong, unapologetic, complicated woman.
Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the centre of her life, Tom, her one great love both found and lost in the "mad fairyland" of war-torn Egypt.
