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A Worthy Rival To ‘The Longest Day’
Antony Beevor’s D-Day book doesn’t end with the battles on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944
D-Day has inspired the literary equivalent of an amphibious assault landing.
Cornelius Ryan set the tone with The Longest Day, a modern classic of narrative nonfiction that has helped to shape how generations of Americans have seen the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Stephen Ambrose, Max Hastings, and others later wrote widely praised books about the campaign that led to the liberation of France from Nazi occupation.
But before the publication of D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Penguin, 2009), no major book about the battle for Normandy had appeared in more than 20 years. In that time, many participants in the invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, had died and left diaries and letters that found their way to historical archives.
Antony Beevor makes superb use of newly available primary sources in a book that deservedly became an international bestseller.
