Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson stopped by yesterday to sign copies of An Army at Dawn. This book is intended to be the first installment of a trilogy that will describe the liberation of Europe in World War II. This first book is about the liberation of North Africa, and the next two will cover Italy and France. Naturally, I asked him how the books were coming along, and he told me that he had put them on hold while he was embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, and now he is writing a book about that experience. It will be exciting to see the many quality books that are being written by journalists and writers who spent time over there. We also discussed John Keegan, who seems to be the authority when it comes to popular histories of war. Atkinson professed to loving both The Mask of Command, which studies generals and commanders in wars from Ancient Greece to the present, and The Face of Battle, which gives similar treatment to the common soldier. Later on, while I was reading about those two Keegan books, I was pleased to discover that he has a new book that is a mere two weeks from hitting the shelves. It is enticingly titled, Intelligence in Warfare: From Nelson to Hitler.
Author Sighting
Elias Canetti’s Words Against Death
The marks on the page are the opposite of the marks on the tombstone.
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Lilly Dancyger Is Rethinking the Ethics of Memoir
"I do think that we, as writers, owe things to the people in our lives that we care about."
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Against ‘Latin American Literature’
The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double-bind.
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What Millions Readers Are Reading (Vol. 1)
We asked about the books you're currently reading. You answered.
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Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In
"It was hard on many levels, and I had to keep going back to why I was writing in the first place."
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“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts”:
Valeria Luiselli on Juan Rulfo
"Rulfo travels in time and space with an absolute freedom without us getting lost."
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