Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(1)
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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.

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!

Extraordinary recounting of this fine writer's experiences as a war correspondent in WW II. A wonderful companion that frequently reminds us that our lives today, while plagued with difficulties, are no more challenged than those who have gone before us. This book entertains, informs, and ultimately instructs in the most subtle ways ... as good memoirs and histories should.

It's called 'Between Meals' and it's going to be included in the follow-up volume by Library of America due March 19, 2009. But you've got to get this volume too, as a taste of what's to come. Really, you're going to want to have everything Mr. Liebling wrote after you've read his reporting on D Day. And with the inclusion of out-of-print material that's proposed to be in the next volume, you will finally be able to.

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.

Jeffrey from Ohio's review is pretty much right. This collection is outstanding.

The Road Back to Paris, the first book in the collection, is one of the two or three best WWII books ever written and, notably, it covers a part of the war very rarely covered anymore. The writing is simply some of the best English-language writing there is.

As others have mentioned, there is a lot in this collection. Roughly equivalent to four books, I would say. But Liebling is such a compelling writer that I always wanted to get back to reading it.

I read a lot of books and haven't been this pleasantly surprised since Joan Didion's "The White Album." I can't recommend it too highly, for WWII buffs or anyone who likes good writing.

I enjoy Liebling's writings very much, and I admire the Library of America publishing project, but this collection is a failure. The problem is the result of LoA's editorial policy of reprinting an author's books as originally published during his lifetime. It works well for novelists and and other book-writers, but Liebling, as a journalist for the New Yorker magazine, was not primarily an author of books. The collections of his European war dispaches that were published in his lifetime show the marks of quick and careless production, and the illogical order of the pieces is confusing. "The Road Back to Paris" begins in the middle of the campaign in North Africa, digresses to Liebling's pre-war days in France, then backtracks to New York and tells how he received his assignment as a war correspondent. "Mollie and Other War Pieces," though it contains some of his best war reports, also re-prints some of the same stories from "The Road Back to Paris," though not necessarily under the same chapter titles. The present LoA volume includes these two books, without doing the reader the favor of editing them for narrative structure, then adds "Normandy Revisited," written some time after the war's end, and finally for good measure throws in some other of his war reports not previously collected. In sum, the result is a bit redundant and incoherent at the same time.

A better collection of Liebling's war writings is Liebling's War: World War II Dispatches of A.j. Liebling. The editors, not bound by LoA's policy of reprinting only enitre books, take from his original New Yorker pieces and order them chronologically to produce a natural, coherent narrative -- a gift to readers that does real justice to Liebling's craft.