An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

July 8, 2002
Atkinson won a Pulitzer Prize during his time as a journalist and editor at the Washington Post
and is the author of The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966
and of Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. In contrast to Crusade's illustrations of technomastery, this book depicts the U.S. Army's introduction to modern war. The Tunisian campaign, Atkinson shows, was undertaken by an American army lacking in training and experience alongside a British army whose primary experience had been of defeat. Green units panicked, abandoning wounded and weapons. Clashes between and within the Allies seemed at times to overshadow the battles with the Axis. Atkinson's most telling example is the relationship of II Corps commander George Patton and his subordinate, 1st Armored Division's Orlando Ward. The latter was a decent person and capable enough commander, but he lacked the final spark of ruthlessness that takes a division forward in the face of heavy casualties and high obstacles. With Dwight Eisenhower's approval, Patton fired him. The result was what Josef Goebbels called a "second Stalingrad"; after Tunisia, the tide of war rolled one way: toward Berlin. Atkinson's visceral sympathies lie with Ward; his subtext from earlier books remains unaltered: in war, they send for the hard men. Despite diction that occasionally lapses into the melodramatic, general readers and specialists alike will find worthwhile fare in this intellectually convincing and emotionally compelling narrative. (Oct. 2)Forecast:While there's no clear news hook for this title, Atkinson is well known enough to garner readers on name recognition. An eight-city author tour will help raise awareness, as will the marketing of the book as first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson's study of WWII.

June 1, 2002
This Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist launches a trilogy that highlights the importance of the African front during World War II.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2002
Atkinson, author of the best-selling " The Long Grey Line" (1989), a chronicle of the West Point class of 1966, here debuts an ambitious three-volume saga about the North African and European theaters of World War II. This first volume covers the conception of Operation Torch through the German surrender in Tunisia in May 1943 and reveals the author's skill in balancing big-picture strategizing with unit-level tactical fighting. And though well researched, Atkinson's diligence is artfully masked by his fluid narrative. To be sure, the author hews to the general historical verdict that Torch was a strategically dubious operation, and the campaign that ensued was the veritable definition of snafu. Atkinson, understanding the inherent terror and confusion of combat, and hence the difficulty in relating it, fixes on the clarifying tool of topography. The ground of every battle is precisely assessed, with the author apprising readers of how often the experienced German army was superior to the green American army in exploiting hills and roads. Having personally tramped over the battlefields in Morocco and Tunisia, Atkinson incorporates their look--the mud, the dust, and the cactus. An exemplary work that feeds anticipation of the succeeding volumes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)