The Story of World War II

November 1, 2001
Historian Donald L. Miller offers The Story of World War II, an expanded and updated rewrite of Henry Steele Commager's 1945 The Story of the Second World War. Commager was a historian who taught at NYU, Columbia and Amherst; he died in 1998. Miller (Lewis Mumford: A Life) is a professor at Lafayette College and the host of PBS's A Biography of America. With new material from oral accounts, letters and memoirs to which Commager didn't have access and with the inclusion of nearly 200 b & w photographs, Miller alters the footprint but respects the integrity of his predecessor's work. Old-school, just-the-facts-Ma'am historiography is the name of this game, but the extensive, moving testimonies by veterans of their brushes with death and terror humanize and vivify the described events. Maps.