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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing and wrenchingly emotional experience.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Thousand Hour Day (Hardcover)
This book immediately brings to mind the breadth and depth of Dostoevsky. Set in 1939 as Poland is overrun by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, The Thousand Hour Day is filled with eminently believable characters and a sense of the despair and heroism of the time. Detractors might dismiss the book as an attempt to glamorize the Poles or Poland, but the book is far deeper than that. Kuniczak is a Pole who gives us a very real look at the conditions and emotions of the disaster, himself being the son of a Polish officer who fought in the September War. Kuniczak's prose is terse and pointed, but surprisingly effective at painting verbal pictures, whether he be describing a hunter looking for a man-killing bear in a quiet forest or the vicious innuendo leveled at a General's mistress during a high society party. The characters in the novel are representative, but embued with enough quality and depth that you begin to feel them personally. Certainly not a book for everyone, but a treasure for lovers of history and tense drama; this packs a full punch of both.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best historical novel on Hitler's invasion of Poland,
By
This review is from: Thousand Hour Day (Hardcover)
This novel tells of the last couple of weeks before Hitler invaded Poland and the first 6 weeks afterwards. It is the first book in a series. Few people nowadays understand how horrifying the Nazi invasion of Poland was. Poland's military was still trapped in the 19th century, with little armor and even fewer aircraft. Many people think it's a myth that Polish horse cavalry tried to fight Hitler's blitzkrieg but it wasn't and, yes, it was a slaughter. Most of the scenes depicted in this novel are true - the rapes, the refugees trudging miles and miles trying to get away from the big cities, the army desperately hiding in the woods to try to ambush German units. I read the first two books in this series without knowing anything about Poland or their part in WWII. It affected me enough that I read everything I could find on Poland, actually spent a year learning Polish, and I no longer tell Polish jokes. Solidarnosc!
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
worth the wait,
By
This review is from: Thousand Hour Day (Hardcover)
I owned this book for 30 years before I read it. Every time I thought of giving it away or donating it to a book sale, I reminded myself that I have always been interested in knowing more about the German invasion of Poland; the official beginning of WWII. I finally got around to reading it and it was worth the wait. I had to keep in mind that the author is a Pole and so I presumed that he would have a biased approach to history. That was OK for me because most historians just gloss over the Polish invasion leaving only a brief image of Polish calvary attacking German tanks. This novel challenges our perceptions of this event in history. The book describes chaos but it also describes successful Polish counterattacks and infliction of severe losses on the Germans. I had to look up some of the history of this campaign to see if such things really happened. The way the auther tells it, one might expect either side capable of victory. This IS a fascinating book and I found myself engrossed almost from the beginning. The main character is a Polish general who is politically out of favor at the start of the war but becomes a soberly insightful leader. If the book has a weak point, it is the character of the general's son, Adam. Exactly what the author was trying to capture with this character is confusing. It may be that he was to serve as a symbol of Poland as a hostage that no one (i.e.England and France) cared or knew about. Despite such distractions, the focus remains on Germany and Poland. I was beginning to wonder if the Soviet invasion was ever going to materialize in this version. I was three fourths finished with the book before the subject even came up. In general the characters are varied and well developed. The imagery is outstanding including and rape/murder early in the books that haunts the reader well after the novel is finished. This book is out of print and will likely remain so but if you can find a copy, it is well worth reading.
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