World War II

Much to my husband's amusement, I've been on a World War II kick of late.  I found an amazing podcast (The History of World War II), and I have been just loving it.  Mr. Harris is very thorough, and although his podcast series is on episode 59, we're only in August 1941.  So.  I'm all caught up, and needed something else to listen to, while I'm cleaning, packing, driving or whatever.  Continuing the WWII trend, and taking advantage of a sweet free Audible books deal, I have made my way through three new books, and I'm just starting a new one.

In case anyone cares, here are the books I've been listening to, and a rough review of each:

 The Miracle of Dunkirk (Walter Lord)
Dunkirk and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces in 1940 has long fascinated me, but until recently I knew very little about it.  This book turned out to be an excellent overview, with enough individual vignettes and interesting stories to make it difficult to stop listening to.  The narrator (Jeff Cummings) is excellent, as well.  Five stars!

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L Shirer)
This book, published in 1959 and over 1200 pages long, is considered a classic in WWII histories.  Although the events are occasionally colored by Shirer's own experiences in Nazi Germany (he was an American press correspondent prior to the US entering the war), most of the information draws on documentation seized from the Nazi government after their downfall.  Despite the length, I was completely fascinated by this book.  Like in The Miracle of Dunkirk, the narrator of this 57+ hour book (Grover Gardner) is perfect.  (And you have to admire his stamina!)  Five stars.

D-Day:  The Battle for Normandy (Antony Beevor)
Having read about the arc of the Nazi Party, and the escape of the British at Dunkirk, I wanted to know more about D-Day.  It was a little harder to find a good D-Day book, and I'm not 100% sure I've found it yet.  This book disappointed me slightly--it was a little harder to follow, much emphasis was given to troop movements (nearly impenetrable in audio form, without a map or a working knowledge of the area), and, sad to say, the narrator (Cameron Stewart) was not as good as the other two.  He tried to change accents every time a different nationality was being quoted, and I thought that his American accents were--to put it mildly--really, really bad.  (I wonder if his German, French, Australian, or New Zealand accents were as grating to a native speaker of those countries.) I still listened and enjoyed the whole book, but I think I'd have to give it three stars.

The Guns of August (Barbara Tuchman)
I've switched gears with my current book, moving over to World War I.  I've discovered that the underpinnings of WWII are fairly understandable--broadly, the end of WWI lead to WWII.  But what was the cause of WWI? (Not just poor Ferdinand.)  This Pulitzer Prize winning book has been highly recommended for understanding what led to WWI, and the first month of the fighting.  So far -- I'm only 1/5 of the way through -- I'm really enjoying it.  The narrator, John Lee, has been doing a great job thus far.


P.S.  I noticed that, in this post, I've used four of the six sounds that "ough" makes in the English language:  thorough, through, thought, and rough.  Once I realized that I had so many of them, I tried to get them all.  But, try as I might, I just couldn't find a use for "bough" or "cough".  Sorry.