It's always a good day for The Bookshelf when Donald B. Towles is persuaded to contribute a guest review. A retired vice president of The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times Co., Towles writes crisp, incisive prose that gets to the heart of the matter swiftly, and is a pleasure to read. -M.C.
Of all the books written about World War I, few can approach the greatness of Jeff Shaara's "To The Last Man." It is a magnificent piece of work by a magnificent writer.
Shaara is well known as the author of "Gods and Generals" and "The Last Full Measure," two novels that complete the Civil War trilogy that began with his father's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, "The Killer Angels."
Shaara's style in this book is similar. He selects four characters through whose words and actions he tells the fascinating story of the great war that claimed the lives of more than 8 million soldiers over a four-year period and left much of Europe in ruins.
The four principal characters are John J. Pershing, Roscoe Temple, Raoul Lufbery and Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Temple is a U.S. Marine, Lufbery and von Richthofen fliers on opposite sides.
Shaara begins by telling the reader that his book "is not a comprehensive blow-by-blow history of the First World War ... not a history book at all, certainly not in the way you may be familiar with that term from high school." It is, he says, the story of four men told through their points of view. The story moves at a good pace, never races but never falters. It is a book that the reader hates to see come to an end.
Raoul Lufbery was an American born in France, a mechanic turned pilot who joined the fledgling French air force and became one of its top pilots. A quiet man who enjoyed walking in the woods looking for mushrooms, he was highly effective in the air and greatly respected by his comrades.
Later, his squadron became the famed Lafayette Escadrille, a group of Americans fighting for France before the United States entered the war.
Richthofen, equally effective as a German pilot, known as The Red Baron for his fighter plane painted a brilliant red, was hailed throughout Germany as the world's greatest pilot and feared by the French and British fliers. He, also, enjoyed his solitude and hunts in the forests.
The story tells of their aerial battles in detail - how their flimsy craft could become flaming coffins when hit by machine gun fire. The fliers wore no parachutes, so few survived when their planes were shot from the sky. Shaara describes the horror of aerial combat and the emotions of pilots who lost a fri/files/storyimages/in battle.
Pershing was a well-known general when the United States entered the war in 1917, was promoted from captain to brigadier general by his fri/files/storyimages/Teddy Roosevelt, and had suffered personal tragedy when his wife and three daughters were killed in a fire.
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