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Book Summary and Reviews of The War by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

The War by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

The War

An Intimate History, 1941-1945

by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2007, 480 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced—and helped to win—the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost.

Focusing on the citizens of four towns— Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama;—The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the compelling, unflinching narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps—but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men were shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Visually appealing [but] gives little idea of how and why America won, but a strong sense of what it felt like on the way to victory." - PW.

This information about The War was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

The publisher claims a 650,000 first print run for this coffee-table book.

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