description: Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, Stephen E. Ambrose's June 6, 1944 relies on over 1,400 interviews with veterans, as well as prodigious research in military archives on both sides of the Atlantic. He provides a comprehensive history of the invasion that also eloquently testifies as to the ways that common soldiers performed extraordinary feats. He further combines history and journalism to describe how American GIs battled their way to the Rhineland in Citizen Soldiers , which contains memorable accounts of the Battle of the Bulge and other events as seen through the weary eyes of the men who fought in the foxholes. And in Band of Brothers , Ambrose tells the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth, circa 1941-45. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war, but 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."
title: The Best of Stephen Ambrose
titlecomplete: The Best of Stephen Ambrose
genres: History
ratings_count: 23
publisher: Simon & Schuster Academic