Finished The Victors

I finished The Victors last night.

While it was a good read, it was a book I could have probably skipped without missing out much on Ambrose's quality. There are a lot of passages lifted from other books he's written. Notably Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and D-Day: June 6, 1944. I wasn't upset about it; it's something that he admits in the book. And there's never anything wrong with rereading the extraordinary exploits of these incredible soldiers from all of the services on both sides of the battle. If I didn't like reading it I would have stopped. I would have probably said even less than I just did about the repetition were it not that I have read all three of the above books in the recent past.

If I were trying to give someone a flavor for Stephen Ambrose and provide a well-written and fairly well-balanced account from the soldier's side as well as the general's of the war in Europe from early 1944 through the end, this would be the book I'd recommend. I still recommend it for Ambrose's discussions of Eisenhower's thinking and decision-making process. He was Ike's biographer and privvy to his writings during and after the war. There aren't many who knew General Eisenhower as well and intimately as Ambrose.

The next book on the list is The Devil in the White City. This is a novel which intertwines the story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and its architect, Daniel H. Burnham, with H.H. Holmes who was one of the first true serial killers. Holmes murdered between 27 and 200 people in and around Chicago during this time by posing as a doctor and operating The World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and employing his charm and disguise to lure his victims to their ultimate deaths.