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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.548173
EAN num: 9781598530186
ISBN number: 1598530186
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 1100
Printing Date: February 28, 2008
Publishing house: Library of America
Sale Popularity Level: 94306
Studio: Library of America
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Product Description:
One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the “discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate” nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling’s collection of writing from the French Resistance.
The Road Back to Paris (1944) narrates Liebling’s experiences from September 1939 to March 1943, including his shock at the fall of France and dismay at isolationist indifference in the United States; it contains classic accounts of a winter voyage on a Norwegian tanker during the Battle of the Atlantic, visits to front-line airfields in North Africa, and the defeat of a veteran panzer division by American troops in Tunisia. Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964) brings together Liebling’s portrait of a legendary nonconformist American soldier in North Africa with his eyewitness account of Omaha Beach on D-Day, evocative reports from Normandy, and investigation of a German atrocity in rural France. In Normandy Revisited (1958) Liebling writes about his return to France in 1955 and recalls the joyous liberation of his beloved Paris while exploring with bittersweet perception how wartime experience is transformed into memory. The selection of uncollected New Yorker pieces includes a profile of an RAF ace, surveys of the French underground press, and an encounter with a captured collaborator in Brittany, as well as postwar reflections on battle fatigue, Ernie Pyle, and the writing of military history.
With maps and chronology.
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Rated by buyers -
Jeffrey from Ohio's review is pretty much right. This collection is outstanding.
The Road Back to Paris, the very first book in the collection, is one of the two or three best WWII books ever written and, notably, it covers a part of the war very rarely covered anymore. The writing is simply some of the best English-language writing there is.
As others have mentioned, there is a lot in this collection. Roughly equivalent to four books, I would say. But Liebling is such a compelling writer that I always wanted to get back to reading it.
I read a lot of books and haven't been this pleasantly surprised since Joan Didion's "The White Album." I can't recommend it too highly, for WWII buffs or anyone who likes good writing.
Rated by buyers -
Sorry, i haven't even finished this yet, and it will be a while (there's soooo much in this book), but i had to post a review to say this is worth purchasing. If you write for a living, are interested in writing; if you want to know how wars start, proceed, and are conducted; if you wonder what it was like to be a correspondent on a B-26 over France or in a LCI at Normandy or be lost in Tunisia; if you like reading at all, you want to get this book.
The section describing life in France between Hitler's invasion of Poland and the surrender of the Petain government (soon to be Vichy) opens up a whole area that is usually left to a footnote, but explains aspects of modern life in Europe today. Over and over there are sections like that. The pieces are mostly long-form mag pieces, so there's meat, but it is easy to read over a long period, piecemeal.
Buy, buy, buy, buy this book.
Rated by buyers -
I grew up in North Africa, son of a USAAF captain and a Danish mother. Of the dozens of histories I've read on the period, this of the best caliber. He exactly conveys the general atmosphere and chaos that predominates during conflict. In addition, he also revealed early on many of the failings of the political establishment in making decisions on how to conduct the war, and how they allowed their personal agendas to cause much unneeded suffering and actually prolonged the conflict. Five stars!
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