Almost 200 reporters and photographers fanned out around the globe to cover WWII for The Associated Press. Five lost their lives, and seven others won Pulitzer Prizes. This is the first time their photographs have been published in one album.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Mined from the Associated Press archives, these 167 black and white photos are precious historical treasures, ranging from some of the most celebrated images of the century to rare relics not seen since World War II. They're arranged chronogically, with informatively evocative brief captions, a formal yet moving foreword by war hero/Senator/National WW II Memorial Chairman Bob Dole, and an action-packed, you-are-there introduction by death-defying war correspondent Walter Cronkite. Paging through the book almost serves as an impressionistic, quickie history of the conflict, glimpsed from burning airplanes, submarine periscopes, London Underground bomb shelters, rickety rope bridges, decapitated cathedrals, smoking ruins, and scenes of brutality and tenderness, calamity and tearful relief. The context helps rescue the most famous pictures from cliché: you get more from Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer-winning shot of six Marines hoisting the flag atop Iwo Jima by seeing his pix of the battle leading up to it and by reading that half of those six died without ever seeing the photo. If it is not perverse or disrespectful to say so, many of the images are beautiful as art, in the compositional style of Life Magazine (where some appeared). Nurses perched in midair surreally attempt to clean a bombed hospital room whose walls have vanished. British soldiers march in a line past a line of tall white pillars, Roman ruins that echo their shapes. Churchill appears to levitate a RAF fighter by sheer force of will. Even the grisly pictures of victims manage to respect the dead by means of esthetic and journalistic seriousness. Many pictures capture moments of drama so stunning you can't believe the photographer survived—and many didn't. The photo reproductions aren't glossy, but they're gritty, and that's appropriate. They were news. They still are. --Tim Appelo
From Publishers Weekly
While AP did not produce all the good photographs of the war, it certainly produced a very large number. This selection of 170 b&w photos ranges in time from Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1934 to a flyover above the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945. Nagasaki; concentration camp documentation; and burned out European towns mix with the (familiar) flag raising on Iwo Jima and the 28th Infantry Division marching through Paris. Depictions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin together give way to an implacable column of Pacific Fleet warships. Sometimes there is even joy-a classic portrait of George Patton, the Happy Warrior, and a passionate kiss between sailor and nurse celebrating the end of the war. Introductions by Bob Dole and Walter Cronkite are up to the expected standard. The captions occasionally go astray, as on the Russian battle casualties, but the photographs mostly speak for themselves, and the book stands tall as a shelvable version of the exhibit at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station that it accompanies. It’s been more than a generation since everybody grew up with ready access to many of these shots; this book brings them back splendidly.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Great collection,
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This review is from: Memories of World War II: Photographs from the Archives of the Associated Press (Hardcover)
A very good collection of well-known and not-so-well known photos from the war that defined the "greatest generation." Most are incredibly powerful.
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