World War II (1931-1945)
“The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” — Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957)
Of the endless ocean of books on the Second World War, we have dozens and dozens of new and carefully chosen titles. I define it as beginning with the Japanese Empire’s invasion of Manchuria and ending with not only V-E and V-J Days but also the immediate crises of displaced people, the Soviet Union’s creation of the Iron Curtain, and the growing revelations of the extent of the Holocaust.
In significant ways the Second World War was the defining crucible of the 20th Century. The First World War was prelude, the legacy of the 19th Century’s imperialism, and the Cold War was the sequel. Of the making of books about it there is no end — but the persistence of good research and good writing, and good publication underscores the war’s centrality of the world we live in today and the world our descendents will live in for the foreseeable future.
Flight to Arras
Flight to Arras
Flight to Arras is a memoir recounting the author's role in the French Air Force as pilot of a reconnaissance plane during the Battle of France in 1940. The book condenses months of his flights into a single terrifying mission over the town of Arras. At the start of the war there were only fifty reconnaissance crews, of which twenty-three were in his unit. Within the first few days of the German invasion of France in May 1940, seventeen of the crews were sacrificed recklessly, he writes "like glasses of water thrown onto a forest fire". Saint-Exupéry survived the French defeat but refused to join the Royal Air Force over political differences with de Gaulle. In July 1944, "risking flesh to prove good faith", he failed to return from a recon mission over France.