Revised, Expanded, and Updated from the Original T
Donald L. Miller, Henry Steele Commager: Story of World War II (2010, Simon & Schuster)
704 pages
English language
Published 2010 by Simon & Schuster.
Historian Donald L. Miller offers The Story of World War II, an expanded and updated rewrite of Henry Steele Commager's 1945 The Story of the Second World War. Commager was a historian who taught at NYU, Columbia and Amherst; he died in 1998. Miller (Lewis Mumford: A Life) is a professor at Lafayette College and the host of PBS's A Biography of America. With new material from oral accounts, letters and memoirs to which Commager didn't have access and with the inclusion of nearly 200 b & w photographs, Miller alters the footprint but respects the integrity of his predecessor's work. Old-school, just-the-facts-Ma'am historiography is the name of this game, but the extensive, moving testimonies by veterans of their brushes with death and terror humanize and vivify the described events. Maps.
I really enjoyed this book; it presented not only a picture of what it was like for the people on the ground, but also did a good job of giving a picture of the overall war, and putting all of the battles in context.
