In this vivid and deeply moving memoir, novelist Robert Kotlowitz recounts his experiences as a teen-age infantryman in the Second World War. In a voice both restrained and unsentimental, he releases the memories that he has fiercely held on to for fifty years, memories of his comrades in arms, his youthful idealism, and - at the dark center of the tale - the massacre of his platoon in the hills of northeastern France. With his sharp, ironic novelist's eye, Kotlowitz brings every moment of his experience to life, from the day he's drafted as an eighteen-year-old and thrown into basic training and maneuvers in Tennessee (where, in a grimly foreboding incident, twenty fellow recruits drown in the flooded waters of the Cumberland River). We feel the excitement of a young Francophile in the idyllic French countryside, and the anxiety of a Jew about to face the German army. We sense the author's youthful idealism begin to slip away as he faces foolish superiors, senseless orders, useless drudgery. Then, suddenly, Kotlowitz faces death itself: his platoon is sent to the front and finds itself in a tense waiting game with German soldiers dug in only a couple of hundred yards away. Time passes anxiously, punctuated only by artillery fire and the hissing of potshots from German rifles. Eventually, inexplicably, the platoon is ordered to attack - and they are slaughtered. Kotlowitz alone comes through unscathed, but only by playing dead for twelve hours while machine-gun fire, mortar shells, and grenades explode around him and his friends lie dying. He survives, filled with guilt and self-recrimination, as well as rage at the American officers who ordered the attack.
The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake
Dr. Williams discusses his own work and that of such contemporaries as Pound and Eliot and reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of twentieth-century concerns
巴菲特畢生唯一授權傳記 全球首富與世人分享最慷慨的資產 除了股票,巴菲特更教你投資自己 |最新增訂版|新增第63章危機、第64章雪球 ...
本書內容分三部分:一為葉君健所寫評論安徒生其人其文的文章;二為安徒生所寫小故事;三為安徒生繪圖作品
276-9 , 403-3 ) ; William Richard Cutter , Genealogical and Personal Memoirs relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts ( N.Y. , 1908 ) , II , pp . 867-69 ; William Bentley , The Diary of William Bentley ...
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of a Citizen of New-york, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,...
Behind the Scenes. by Elizabeth Keckley. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.
Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton: For Four Years and Four Months a Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) in Washington Jail
When the Press folded after eighteen months , Cooper went to the Indianapolis Sun , as a police reporter . In 1901 he became Scripps - McRae's Indianapolis correspondent and then manager of the Indianapolis bureau , supplying news to a ...
Give Us Each Day: The Diary