Another glorious opportunity to review FREE books has arisen from one of those discussion groups on Linkedin...I normally just delete all those spammy things that come to my mailbox. But one caught my eye that was asking for well qualified reviewers of military history for the New York Journal of Books. Well, I figured this was made for me! And after reviewing my extensive qualifications (no ego check here) and noting my excellent review essays for the Journal of Military History on Iraq and Afghanistan...BLAMMO, I was in...
Check out my page!
I also explored their military history page and noticed they don't seem to have a lot of active reviewers...well, I'll try and fix that. So I asked for and received my first book...and WOWZA, was I happy to get accepted to review it!
Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy has been one of my favorite reads since the first volume was published ten years ago. He won a well deserved Pulitzer Prize for An Army at Dawn, which set the stage for the magnificence of this trilogy and its narration of the war in the European Theater of Operations from 1942-1945. His final volume, The Guns at Last Light, does a magnificent job of telling the tale of the war in Northwest Europe from D-Day to VE-Day. That's all I'm gonna say for now...my review will be posted on the sale date for the book...PRE-ORDER yours now...and order the entire trilogy if you haven't already done so...it's great....
The second book I selected for review, which I am still reading, is an attempt to fill one of my knowledge gaps about World War II (yes, amazingly, I still have a lot). The early days of the Pacific War..from about December 1941 to June 1942, have been somewhat neglected by military historians, especially American historians. Not surprising, since who wants to read about when the U.S. was losing badly to Japan. But there are many heroic tales, especially the story of the U.S. stand in the Philippines from December 1941 until the final surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. This book attempts to tell the tale through the interweaving of numerous oral histories and goes from the beginning of the war, through the surrender of Japan, showing the brutality the captured Americans survived and the wholesale bungling of the defense of the Philippines by senior American military officers...although to be fair, there was little likelihood the islands could hold out with the Pacific Fleet sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. We'll see how well Mr. Sloan does with this subject. 
AND...just cuz I love it...I requested another book which I hope an advance copy will be arriving soon. Max Hastings has been one of my favorite authors since I read his history of the Falklands War during my Academy days...yes that was a long time ago. He is most notably a historian of World War II, but appears to be diving into World War I. This is one of my more significant historical gaps, but with the 100th anniversary coming up, I expect LOTS of new scholarship which I am looking forward to in the next four years.So free books and a chance to write some more...win, win...
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