World War II Memoirs: The European Theater (LOA #385)

World War II Memoirs: The European Theater (LOA #385)
Author: Charles B. Macdonald
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 914
Release: 2024-11-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1598537865

On the 80th anniversary of the war's end, 5 classic memoirs capture firsthand the shock, terror, and courage of the American fight against the Axis powers in Europe "The emotional environment of warfare has always been compelling," writes J. Glenn Gray in his incomparable World War II memoir and mediation, The Warriors. "Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it." The struggle to make sense of the experience of war, to find some meaning in the savagry and senseless destruction, animates the five brilliant and unforgettable memoirs gathered here. Company Commander (1947), by Charles B. MacDonald, describes with startling immediacy and candor the “cold, dirty, rough, frightened, miserable” life of the infantryman and company commander from the aftermath of D-Day in September 1944 through the war's terrifying final days. The Warriors (1959), by J. Glenn Gray, a counterintelligence officer who served in Italy, France, and Germany and a scholar with a PhD. in philosophy, is a sensitive and revelatory meditation on the nature of war and its effects on both soldiers and civilians, interspliced with his letters, journals, and wartime memories. All the Brave Promises (1966) is novelist Mary Lee Settle’s memoir of her year as an airfield radio operator in the Royal Air Force. Settle brilliantly evokes both the working-class culture of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force’s “other ranks” and the petty and demeaning regimentation inherent in military life. The Fall of Fortresses (1980), by former B-17 navigator Elmer Bendiner, vividly recalls the fear and excitement he experienced flying bomber missions deep into Germany in 1943 without fighter escort. The Buffalo Saga (2009) is James Harden Daugherty’s heartfelt account of his frontline service as a Black soldier in the 92nd Infantry Division, as he fights the Germans, endures the harsh Italian winter, and confronts the racism of his own army. This deluxe Library of America volume includes full-color endpaper maps of the European Theater, an eight-page photo insert, an introduction by West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, and detailed notes.

Reporting Vietnam Vol. 2 (LOA #105)

Reporting Vietnam Vol. 2 (LOA #105)
Author: Milton J. Bates
Publisher: Library of America Classic Jou
Total Pages: 936
Release: 1998-10
Genre: History
ISBN:

Includes indexes. Part 2 American journalism 1969-1975.

Flights of Passage

Flights of Passage
Author: Samuel Hynes
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780747578116

A gripping, literary recollection of a pilot's experiences during WWII.

Soldier's Heart

Soldier's Heart
Author: Elizabeth D. Samet
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2004-08-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429933194

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings (LOA #181)

A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings (LOA #181)
Author: Abbott Joseph Liebling
Publisher: Library of America A. J. Liebl
Total Pages: 1112
Release: 2008-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN:

The road back to Paris -- Mollie and other war pieces -- Uncollected war journalism -- Normandy revisited.

Looking for the Good War

Looking for the Good War
Author: Elizabeth D. Samet
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374716129

“A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Willing Obedience

Willing Obedience
Author: Elizabeth D. Samet
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804747257

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject's blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.

Multi-Domain Battle in the Southwest Pacific Theater of World War II

Multi-Domain Battle in the Southwest Pacific Theater of World War II
Author: Combat Studies Institute Press
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-07-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9781086087291

"Multi-Domain Battle in the Southwest Pacific Theater of World War II" provides a historical account of how US forces used synchronized operations in the air, maritime, information, and land domains to defeat the Japanese Empire. This work offers a historical case that illuminates current thinking about future campaigns in which coordination among all domains will be critical for success.

Unbroken

Unbroken
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812974492

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks