A.J. Liebling: World War II Writings (Library of America) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Pete Hamill (Editor) "THERE IS an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Quietly, wittily, and humanely, Liebling introduces the reader to the common men in and around battle, and because of that probably gives a truer picture of things than most books about war.”
—The Times (London)

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1100 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (February 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530186
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530186
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #240,609 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisitely prescient, March 28, 2008

By	Patrick "snowyb" (Jasper County, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews

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!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you love good writing, global politics, human interest, or WWII . . ., June 5, 2008

By	Jeffrey Gill "Knapsack" (Granville, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liebling is the best. Period., December 18, 2008

By	Robert R. Frump "Bob" (Summit, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

It's ironic that you have to track this book down in Amazon.com A search under his name earlier today yielded nothing. A.J. Liebling is one of the great American non-fiction writers. Period Buy all you can and read all you can.