Word: toland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston Laughing in the Hills, Bill Barich Lyndon, Merle Miller Nature and Culture, Barbara Novak No Man's Land, John Toland Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
These days, American veterans who want to relive the horrid past make pilgrimages to Bataan or plan fraternal parties in Hürtgen Forest. But when it comes to war stories and patriotic gore, World War II trails well behind memories of another war, as John Toland amply proves in this plodding yet passionately detailed resurrection...
...artillery barrage), and after years of stalemate blew a wedge, at places 100 miles wide and 40 miles deep, in Allied lines. By early summer, Germany seemed within a hot breath of taking Paris, driving the British army into the sea and winning the war. Then the Americans, as Toland puts it, finally got a chance to "show the world that [they] could fight as well as talk," and the counterattacks began. The overextended German army collapsed. In November the Kaiser resigned, and a scrappy little corporal, twice decorated for gallantry, flung himself on his hospital cot and wept...
...none of this is news, it has rarely been so methodically worked over. Toland's main intent is to evoke the sweep of battle from the Chemin des Dames to the Marne, from Belleau Wood to the Argonne. He sometimes wrings from familiar historic horrors memorable touches of contrary humanity. What was it like to listen to 8,500 guns, a sound that no human ear had ever heard before? For Winston Churchill, who visited France to see the war firsthand, the crescendo rose "exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass...
...conventional view that modern wars decide nothing, and that, in any case, individuals have no effect on their outcome. Toland cannot manage the magic of historic imagination that will make a reader really believe, as many Frenchmen and Englishmen believed in 1918, that the Germans were about to win the war. But it is hard to read his book without concluding that the course of these sprawling, murderous battles was often changed by individuals or small groups of men, whose sense of honor, courage, comradeship or simple professional efficiency drove them to extreme effort. Toland's most touching example...