D-Day and the Liberation of France (Milestones in Modern World History)

Gr 9 Up–Both books suffer from major errors, omissions, misspellings, internal inconsistencies, and poor organization. Many footnotes are incorrect, with an unusually high number of citations in D-Day mangled or taken out of context. Collapse has no maps, a deplorable oversight; D-Day contains only one, and it’s small and incomplete. Although both titles include chronologies and time lines, the latter are merely highlights from the former, and thus redundant. The lack of glossaries is a definite drawback. Both authors overuse the passive voice. Davenport plunges right in to D-Day preparations with no explanation, assuming basic familiarity with World War II. He makes a thrilling military event tedious, dull, and overwhelmingly confusing, and concludes on a decidedly negative note. Of numerous titles on D-Day, the best for this age is R. Conrad Stein’s The World War II D-Day Invasion in American History (Enslow, 2004). Darraj uses five of nine chapters to review Russian history from the 800s through the early 1980s. She dramatically begins with Reagan’s “Tear down this [Berlin] wall” speech while ignoring his far more influential “evil empire” reference and repeatedly and annoyingly defers to scholars and historians for unimportant quotes or items that are common knowledge.Ann W. Moore, Schenectady County Public Library, NY© Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.