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Category Archives: ww2 writers

Battleground Pacific: A Marine Rifleman’s Combat Odyssey in K/3/5 by Sterling Mace and Nick Allen Review

Thursday, August 30, 2012

I met Sterling Mace online, after making this rather short post about an interview he gave on a Reddit AMA. Not thinking the post would ever reach him, his response to me personally was about “setting the record straight,” of defining the position of riflemen, in relation to mortarmen, machine gunners, and officers. You see, Sterling […]

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Monday Conversations About Dick Winters

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

So on campus today, I had the chance to speak to a student who used to see Dick Winters once a month for sunday dinner. “Really?” I said. “I was ten at the time, more or less, and I went over there with my friend.” He did not mention if the friend was a grandson […]

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William Shirer and Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Friday, December 28, 2007

A review of Shirer’s epic text is here.  The author of the review… he’s pretty good.

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Don Burgett and The War

Saturday, September 29, 2007

If you happened to catch Episode 4 of Ken Burns’ The War (this is the invasion episode), you may have noticed the paratrooper/smashed pumpkin simile, with no author attributed. It was referenced as “one man described it as…”. That one man is Don Burgett, member of the 101st Airborne (A-1st-506), and noted author of four […]

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ww2 book reviews in the Washington Post

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Reading the Book World section of the Washington Post, I came across two ww2 themed reviews.  An American Hero looks like a winner, and After the Reich looks like the dog of the pairing.  Check’em both out. IKE–An American Hero By Michael Korda AFTER THE REICH–The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation By Giles MacDonogh

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Poet: Randall Jarrell

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

In the 102 class I teach (comp and lit), I have a section of “conflict” poems. For me, it’s not enough to include all the old standards about love or death, identity, or the many in that fat anthology about animals. That’s too easy. “Conflict” types of poems are important to read as well. Among […]

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Shark Week, #5

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

I got to thinking about a passage I read in Fussell’s Wartime (I keep going back to that, I know, but it’s a great read) about public discourse (or what people could/would actually say in the 1940s regarding the actualities of conflict). Much of F’s argument has to do with light v. heavy duty, his […]

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Band of Brothers?

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Some time ago in a ww2 forum, I read a post that basically said this: “You mean Ambrose didn’t coin the term Band of Brothers?” Sometimes I have these moments where I’d like to scream through the computer and say something bad, like “mix in some other kinds of reading now and then, eh?” But […]

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Paul Fussell

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Way back in the day, I read The Great War and Modern Memory. That was grad school in a class called Continental European literature. We read a wide variety of texts there, but Fussell’s stood head and shoulders above all others. Much later, I came to Fussell’s other works, notably Wartime and his memoir Doing […]

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