|
These are fun and often interesting tales of World War 2, although where the fact ends and the fiction begins is often hard to tell. Many - indeed most - of the two-to-three page vignettes offer as a source, in addition to articles, books, and interviews, something called 'Author's Archives,' prompting the question: if the source material didn't come from anything written or spoken, where did it come from. Indeed, I consulted one of the cited works for one of the tales and found very little resemblance between the two accounts. Still, Breuer is a good story-teller, so if you're not too fussy about factual exactitude, you might enjoy this book.
I found this book very interesting and highly entertaining, not boring at all. Written in short stories, I couldn't put it aside. Great book.
This work is a mildly interesting collection of semi-familiar "tales." It is so poorly written that it reads like a first draft. Where was the editor.
And in some cases author Breuer just gets its wrong: German magnetic mines, for example, were NOT as he says magnetic in the sense of being drawn the metallic mass of a nearby boat where they exploded on contact, but rather stationary and tethered and set off by the passing of a nearby magnetic field (when they worked, that is, which wasn't often). None are top secret and some are inaccurate. This is a collection of short squibbs of just about everything you have already read about WW2. Worse, perhaps, the writing is on par with a 6th grader: one small section (the two pages of magnetic mines) calls these things "fiendish devices" and "infernal devices" within paragraphs. If you want to read good non-fiction on war, dump this and turn to John Keegan.
|
