Miss Lee Ann (hey!) over at Spinsters notes a Boston Globe review about Winston Groom's newest book about The Great War, A Storm in Flanders. Lee Ann mentions that it sounds like it might be pretty good.

I mentioned last month that I had gotten a copy, but I only finished it last week sometime. I generally agree with the reviewer--Groom didn't start out to write a scholarly essay full of footnotes--it is meant to be more of an overview, and as that it does relatively well. It is a good book, but it seems to suffer the indexcarditis that I keep seeing lately, such as in The Wild Blue by Stephen Ambrose. There are several instances when phrases or passages seem to repeat themselves (of course, part of this is simply the shear repetitiveness of action along the Ypres front), and the blending of first-person recollections and Groom's narrative is sometimes a bit choppy. The most powerful parts of the book are, in fact, the letters home from what was essentially a 400 mile long open grave. Even those written by the least educated men have a power and eloquence that is difficult to describe, and Groom's additions and commentary don't do them justice.

It's not a bad book, but publishing is a business. There are many more, much better books about World War I out there, but none of them written by the author of Forrest Gump.
posted by Terry at 9:22:00 AM