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Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its...
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Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its...
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by Joseph Persico
Sales Rank : 119274
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Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks October 11, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375760458
ISBN-13: 978-0375760457
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
A tight focus—the activities of the British and American troops on the final morning of WWI—has yielded a somewhat sprawling study for Persico, who coauthored Colin Powell's My American Journey and whose Roosevelt's Secret War made the cover of several book reviews. Some soldiers laid down their arms and waited quietly for 11 a.m.; others suffered heavy casualties (a total of about 10,000) because aggressive commanders (including General Pershing) insisted on launching assaults right up to the last minute. Incidents of the final morning are sandwiched between an episodic overview of the Anglo-American experience on the Western Front (to the detriment of other nations and theaters of war) and capsule biographies of prominent and ground-level players in the war. The narratives of battles are something of a mixed bag, but more than commonly readable for the lay reader. Although not satisfyingly organized, the book is a good introduction to what it covers for new students of WWI.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
For readers who may be new to the chronology and character of World War I, popular historian Persico (Nuremburg: Infamy on Trial, 1994) illustrates the struggle by treating its last day as typifying the war. About 2,700 Allied and German soldiers died in combat on November 11, 1918, about the average daily toll for the war. The difference is that many perished under officers knowledgeable of the imminent armistice. Why? That is the fundamental question Persico's story poses. Although there are explanations (French Marshal Foch and American General Pershing opposed terminating the war and let their existing offensives continue), Persico contrasts them with the actual results. Implicitly, he is instilling the dominant historical conception of WWI as mindless wastage as he sutures personal memoirs into a two-level narrative. One level tracks the last-minute attacks of that last day, and another traces the trench experiences of several soldiers through the length of the war. The latter technique permits Persico to chronicle the war's principal campaigns via the experiences of generals and down the organizational chain to corporals and privates. Effectively marshaling his source material, Persico powerfully reconstructs Armistice Day as an emblem of the war. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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