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Decription:
Collected here for the first time are fifteen essays that span over
100 years of American history--and the remarkable thirty-year career
of America's foremost historian. Ambrose's vivid and compelling
essays take you to the heart of America's wars, from Grant's stunning
Fourth of July victory at Vicksburg, to Nixon's surprise Christmas
bombing of Hanoi. Ambrose brings to life the ambition and charisma
that led to Custer's great success in the Civil War and fateful
disaster at Little Big Horn. With vivid imagery and precise commentary,
he puts you on the beaches of Normandy with the common footsoldier
and in the headquarters of America's great commanders, Eisenhower,
Patton and MacArthur. He takes you to the trenches of the homefront,
ground zero of the Atomic Bomb, and into the arsenals of the twenty-first
century.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction
Struggle for Vicksburg: The Battles and Siege That Decided the
Civil War
Custer's Civil War
"Just Dumb Luck": American Entry into World War II
SIGINT: Deception and the Liberation of Western Europe
D-Day Revisited
Victory in Europe: May 1945
The Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences
General MacArthur: A Profile
A Fateful Friendship: Eisenhower and Patton
The War on the Home Front
My Lai: Atrocities in Historical Perspective
The Christmas Bombing
Eisenhower and NATO
The Cold War in Perspective
War in the Twenty-First Century
- Total pages : 252 pages
 Ed's
Analysis:
From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly
With its 15 essays (eight previously unpublished, the remaining
published in various journals over the course of 30 years), this
is a precis of a brilliant career. Reflecting such works as Crazy
Horse and Custer, D-Day, Undaunted Courage and Eisenhower and Berlin,
1945, these essays show Ambrose as a wide-ranging writer and a historian
who does his best to understand the soldiers he studies, whether
through thousands of interviews or through a swim in the choppy
June waters off Normandy. After the first, longest and most strictly
tactical piece on Vicksburg, he moves more or less chronologically
to the 21st century and the future of war. He offers three profiles,
not of the men he admires most, but of three histrionic egotists
-- Custer, MacArthur and Patton -- with complicated personal and
martial legacies. Ambrose doesn't shy away from the most controversial
subjects, but rather marshals fact and feeling in convincing argument.
Take 'The Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences,' in which he contends
that the atomic bomb may have saved Japanese lives by allowing the
country's military leaders a face-saving way to get out of a war
long lost. Without the bomb and the surrender, Japan would have
been subjected to extensive conventional bombardment, and, Ambrose
reminds us, the March 1945 raid on Tokyo caused more casualties
than did the atomic bombs. His discussion of My Lai never gives
the specifics of the 1968 massacre. But in a long accounting of
Meriwether Lewis' ongoing minor skirmishes with Native Americans,
Wounded Knee and other incidents, he puts My Lai into a context
of terror, anger and lost control. 'My Lai,' he says, 'was not an
exception or an aberration. Atrocity is a part of war that needs
to be recognized and discussed.'
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