Band of Brothers
2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by darkhorse4460 from Bletchingdon, Oxfordshire United Kingdom on Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Amazon.co.uk Review
As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose uses Band of Brothers to tell the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from gruelling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas", on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest", where they drank the his (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Robert Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic CO who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a GI by his CO for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle".
For those who saw the fabulous TV series (see it if you haven't) - this is what it was based on. Gripping and moving stuff and I'm not usually the kind of gal who likes to read military history, but in the end its the human stories of courage and comradeship that count.
As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose uses Band of Brothers to tell the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from gruelling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas", on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest", where they drank the his (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Robert Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic CO who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a GI by his CO for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle".
For those who saw the fabulous TV series (see it if you haven't) - this is what it was based on. Gripping and moving stuff and I'm not usually the kind of gal who likes to read military history, but in the end its the human stories of courage and comradeship that count.
Journal Entry 2 by darkhorse4460 at The Duke's Cut (previously Rosie O'Grady's) in Oxford, Oxfordshire United Kingdom on Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Released 14 yrs ago (9/3/2009 UTC) at The Duke's Cut (previously Rosie O'Grady's) in Oxford, Oxfordshire United Kingdom
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
For release at the meet on Thursday.
For release at the meet on Thursday.
Picked this up at The Duke's Cut for Harry.