RaveThe Wall Street JournalA (literally) day-by-day account of the fighting that alternates between American, British and Commonwealth, German, and Italian sources. It’s an approach that risks becoming a dull litany of events, but the author avoids the pitfall by detouring into character vignettes and war-nerd-satisfying weapons analysis ... Holland has no inclination to experiment with structure—but no matter ... History should be tragic and glorious, sobering and enlightening, but instead we’re fobbed off with fodder and muck cranked out by cable-news hosts, third-rate thriller writers, propagandists posing as journalists, and grifters masquerading as scholars. Their combined talents have achieved the singular feat of making history both tedious and tendentious. We need more American Hollands.
Jim Rasenberger
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a lively biography of Samuel Colt ... Mr. Rasenberger doesn’t seek to score points one way or another, saying instead that he has \'no agenda other than to honestly tell what happened to Sam Colt, his gun, and America in the years 1814 to 1862\' ... There are any number of gun books out there that assume the form of technical manuals for collectors and hobbyists, but Revolver, written with a journalist’s sense of color and a historian’s eye for the revealing detail, is an exceptional biography of an archetypal 19th-century American inventor and businessman. And while it’s always tempting to lament, \'we shall not see his like again,\' in fact we already have—in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists fund the modern Porterites, nowadays known as engineers, computer scientists and coders, tinkering with stuff to create the future.
Saul David
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a very fine book ... brought home that World War II belongs to an era fast disappearing ... [Winslow] has both a knack with the pen and a nose for a thrilling tale ... Special forces are always cool—though 99% (by my rough estimate) of any big war’s work is conducted by regular joes—and books relating their exploits are always exciting, especially when related in so masterly a style as Mr. David’s ... Where Mr. David breaks the mold, and shows off his skill as a historian, are his lively chapters on the high-level debates among Winston Churchill, Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, Gen. George C. Marshall and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower about the formation and purpose of the First Special Service Force ... These strategic and operational aspects generally get left out by lesser hands in the genre, but Mr. David has done good work in the archives to complement his interviews with the surviving veterans and their families. His explanations of weapons and tactics are clear and illuminating ... quite rare in encompassing not only the tip of the spear but also who threw the spear, how the spear was thrown, the people it was being thrown at and why it was thrown in the first place.
David Hackett Fischer
RaveNational ReviewFischer’s essential technique, a trademark throughout his books, is to mine this ore of hard data and refine it sufficiently to reveal the era’s broader social structures, its greater forces, and the influence these bear on the formation of collective “mentalities” ... Fischer seems the sort of genuinely enlightened, unpoliticized don once common here and abroad ... Half Annaliste, half American (the book clips along like an adventure story), Washington’s Crossing is a nonfiction book that reads like fiction, partly owing to Fischer’s expertise in selecting, compressing, and positioning materials ... Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing has, like Dante’s Virgil, pointed the way towards squaring that eternal circle. It’s even a pity it wasn’t a bit longer.
Don Winslow
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a very fine book ... brought home that World War II belongs to an era fast disappearing ... [Winslow] has both a knack with the pen and a nose for a thrilling tale ... Special forces are always cool—though 99% (by my rough estimate) of any big war’s work is conducted by regular joes—and books relating their exploits are always exciting, especially when related in so masterly a style as Mr. David’s ... Where Mr. David breaks the mold, and shows off his skill as a historian, are his lively chapters on the high-level debates among Winston Churchill, Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, Gen. George C. Marshall and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower about the formation and purpose of the First Special Service Force ... These strategic and operational aspects generally get left out by lesser hands in the genre, but Mr. David has done good work in the archives to complement his interviews with the surviving veterans and their families. His explanations of weapons and tactics are clear and illuminating ... quite rare in encompassing not only the tip of the spear but also who threw the spear, how the spear was thrown, the people it was being thrown at and why it was thrown in the first place.
