Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour Persico, Joseph E.

Joseph Persico

Random House]

November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M, yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered–more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion. Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous–among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers’ lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war’s last hour. Persico recounts the war’s bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, and Paths of Glory. The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called “the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought.”

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax

History

Americas

The former Rockefeller aide and speech writer recreates the life and several careers of the man whose resources, long public service, charm, and political power, and energy never won him the one office he desired, the presidency.

Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson Rockefeller

Simon&Schuster

My Enemy, My Brother

In July 1863 the invading Army of Northern Virginia, confident from its victory at Chancellorsville, unexpectedly encountered the Army of the Potomac, still without a general Lincoln could trust, at a small town in Pennsylvania. And there, among the verdant hills, rich fields, and sparkling brooks around Gettysburg, the two armies slaughtered each other in fearful numbers. My Enemy, My Brother is a remarkable re-creation of that battle, told not as military strategists have told it, but the way soldiers, doctors, shopkeepers, farmers, and wives lived it. Drawn from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the people at Gettysburg, Persico's powerful work chronicles the passions and beliefs, the day-to-day routines, the pain and the terror of those caught up in the epic conflict that, for thousands, became their last role on earth.

Pocket

Piercing the Reich

SPHERE

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Books by Joseph Persico