Good niche military history.
An account of an overlooked piece of World War II history.
During the early hours before the massive Normandy landing on June 6, 1944, thousands of Allied paratroopers descended behind German lines. Many missed their drop zones, including two companies that landed 15 miles away in the marshes of the Cotentin Peninsula. After dawn, the soldiers noticed a village atop a nearby hill, and about 180 men drifted in during the following days. Historians have described the resulting Battle of Graignes in passing, but Rabe, a Marine Corps veteran, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, and son of one of the paratroopers, gives it his full attention. The story is particularly inspiring because the townspeople and surrounding farmers universally welcomed the soldiers, fed and sheltered them, gathered intelligence, and sent boats into the waterways to recover supplies. Unable to accomplish their original goal, the paratroopers hoped to delay German forces racing toward the invasion beaches 20 miles away. Lightly armed with no artillery, tanks, or antitank weapons, they could not hope to do so for long. They drove off initial attacks by an SS division but were soon devastated by superior numbers and artillery fire. Survivors abandoned the city, approximately 110 eventually reaching Allied lines. After accepting the surrender of a doctor, two medics, and 14 wounded left behind, German soldiers shot them. They also killed 44 French civilians and burned Graignes to the ground after an orgy of pillaging and looting. Overwhelmed by surrounding events, this defense of an obscure village did not attract attention until decades had passed and memories became spotty and perhaps idealized. Rabe does a fine resurrection job, assembling his material and filling out the text with mostly engaging diversions, including the history of American airborne forces, biographies of its two leading generals (who were preoccupied elsewhere), details of the Normandy landings, and subsequent battles across France.
Good niche military history.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-009-20637-2
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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