April 20, 2009
Pulitzer Prizes announced today
For fans of Jewish books, it was slim pickens among the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners announced today.
However, among the finalists for the prizes (they were announced today also), there was one book that caught my eye as something we could feature on this blog.
It was William I. Hitchcock’s “The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe.” The book has had a lot of great things said about it, including this bit of praise from Foreign Affairs:
In the hands of a less deft historian, this project could have come across as a revisionist attempt to question the necessity, or at least the manner, of the liberation, but Hitchcock avoids that trap. The stories he tells of the Normandy invasion, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the occupation of Germany may be familiar, but the prose is gripping and the perspective of the liberated a fresh twist. This is a remarkable work of history that also sheds light on present-day debates about the merits and the costs of liberating people by force.
Buy The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe >>>
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