What I Just Read

Stephen Ambrose is America's greatest assembly-line historian. And in The Victors he takes assembly line history writing to a new level with this cut-and-paste summary of the best passages of his prior World War II histories. The Victors covers the time period between D-Day until the fall of Berlin, and the pages contain what everyone should expect from a Stephen Ambrose book, vivid, colorful and lifelike portraits of the war from the soldiers themselves. If you want to understand the strategy, tactics or geopolitics behind World War II, you'll get more insights and better information from reading other historians. I'd start with John Keegan's exceptional The Second World War. However, if you're new to the subject of World War II and you want a fast-reading and gripping (and admittedly American-centric) survey of what life was like in the war, Ambrose will give you exactly what you need. Ambrose's great gift was his ability to dig colorful stories and anecdote...

"Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence." --John le Carre, from his website I had the unique pleasure of reading for the first time a John le Carre novel, Our Game. I picked it out of a bin of throwaway paperbacks, thinking it would be a trashy, page-turning, throwaway novel. I expected a few hours of forgettable reading to help me forget that I was on a twelve hour plane ride to New Zealand . This book was not forgettable. And it introduced me to a new (to me) fiction writer who I look forward to reading again and again. Everyone compares these books to the action-packed spy novels of Ian Fleming, but the two are so different that the very comparison itself is misleading. Ian Fleming is flash, drama, excitement, and of course, narciss...