Product Description

As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, kept getting the tough assignments -- responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose tells of the men in this brave unit who fought, went hungry, froze, and died, a company that took 150 percent casualties and considered the Purple Heart a badge of office. Drawing on hours of interviews with survivors as well as the soldiers' journals and letters, Stephen Ambrose recounts the stories, often in the men's own words, of these American heroes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9882 in Books
• Brand: HBO
• Published on: 2001-09-06
• Released on: 2001-08-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .79" h x 6.18" w x 9.17" l, .84 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743224543
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Amazon.com Review
As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose tells the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from grueling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas," on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest," where they drank the madman's (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Bobby Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic C.O. who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral.

The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a G.I. by his C.O. for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle." --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
Ambrose ( Pegasus Bridge ) narrates in vivid detail the adventures, misadventures, triumphs and tragedies of a single U.S. Army infantry company over its span of organizational life. Formed in July 1944 and deactivated in November 1945, E Company was one of the most successful light infantry units in the European theater. Its troops saw their first action on D-Day behind the Normandy beachhead, took part in Operation Market Garden in Holland, held the perimeter around Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and were the first to reach Hitler's Bavarian outpost at Berchtesgaden. The book is enlivened with pertinent comments by veterans of "Easy Company," who recall not only the combat action but their relations with their officers (one company commander was a petty tyrant of the worst type, but his oppressive ways had much to do with the unit's impressive esprit de corps ) and their impressions of the countries through which they campaigned (hated the French, loved the Germans). This is a terrific read for WW II actions buffs. Photos. Military Book Club main selection; Literary Guild alternate.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Ambrose (history, Univ. of New Orleans), who has written numerous military histories, intersperses his text with reminiscences, diary entries, and letters from the men who served in a single elite airborne company from its formation until after the war's end. The focus on one company, combined with the author's solid research and excellent prose, produces a book that vividly evokes both the excitement of battle and the hours of boredom away from combat. Like Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell's The Men of Company K: The Autobiography of a World War II Rifle Company ( LJ 12/85), this book accurately describes the lives of the men who bore the brunt of war. If a library could make only one purchase covering the American soldier in combat during World War II in Europe, this would be the book. Highly recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/92.
-Dennis L. Noble, Washington State Lib., Clallam Bay Corrections Ctr.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.