Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Movie, Book, and Music Review WWII Fiction lovers??

Since we have a bit of a WWII theme going on here and just about everything but fiction has been brought up, I thought I�d make a couple of recommendations.

Greg Iles is a very popular writer in the Thriller genre, but his first two books were fictional books based around interesting nuances of WWII.

Spandau Pheonix and Black Cross are the two books and they are simply outstanding. Iles is a story teller without peer and I can guarantee you won�t sleep until you finish the books.

Enjoy.

You've listed the same book twice. Did you intend to list also
Sleep No More
Blood Memory
Trapped
The Footprints of God
The Quiet Game
24 Hours
Mortal Fear
or
Black Cross?

Black Cross...Sorry for the oops.

The two major appeals in a book are (a) the story and (b) the writer's prose style. Either alone can be enough to make a book memorable. A book that combines 'em both is a winner whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

For content, I prefer nonfiction. Too often, though, the nonfiction books' stories are great but their writers' styles are less than enjoyable. Some fiction is hard to get-down because either the stories are blah or the writer's prose is tough going. I just finished reading several novels by a writer friend whose stories are OK but reading his prose takes some effort. Loyalty to a friend kept me at it. Now, more than ever, I sympathize with Twain's definition of a classic as a work that "everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read."

I enjoy "contentless" books, too, like the Calvin and Hobbes collections. They take no effort, they help me laugh, and I don't have any puzzlement or sadness after I've read 'em.

Fiction about war must be quite a challenge for a writer.

I enjoyed the book "The War of the Rats", although I can't remember who wrote it. Based on a true story from what I recall.

I've got a good collection of Calvin and Hobbes as well Ken...


SS

I read massive amounts of non-fiction, so the mental escapism of a good fiction tale is very enjoyable for me. We all have our weak points, but the one that I have that irritates me the most is that I�m not a very creative person, so I really appreciate a clever yarn that is well told. Iles is both clever in his plots and masterful in the presentation. I wish he wrote more books like Spandau Phoenix and Black Cross .

The best WW II fiction was written in the early 1960s, IMO. At least that's when I read it.

Long out of print books that were popular for a short time, not the long-lasting books of James Jones, which aren't read much any more either. Not a whole lot of interest in books about that war, except non-fiction. The fictional issues these books were directed at were again addressed in Viet Nam era books, and being more politically current, over rode the WW II generation, at least fictionally.

Even less fiction about the Korean war. Gotta wonder why.

I used to read WW II fiction when I was a teenager. Titles I couldn't even begin to remember. One, I think, was "The Wax Boom" or something like that.

"War of the Rats" is, I suppose, loosely based on a true story. But VERY loosely. It was made into a movie called "The Enemy at the Gates." To add to the confusion, the book titled "The Enemy at the Gates" is non-fiction and quite excellent. It mentions the sniper vs. sniper duel that was the basis of The War of the Rats for maybe a paragraph.

Since this thread began, I've reread an old novel (Run Silent, Run Deep) and read the same author's (CDR Edward L Beach) two other novels about World War Two submarine warfare in the Pacific (Cold Is the Sea and Dust on the Sea). Good reading!

But I still find the nonfiction books about World War Two far more engrossing and satisfying. Former radio-operator Jim Smith's The Last Mission (about the period between the A-bombing of Nagasaki and V-J Day) is my current absorption, and O'Kane's Wahoo and Clear the Bridge, along with one about O'Kane (The Bravest Man) are recently discovered classics � permanent hard-cover additions to the World War Two section of the Powley Center library, right along with Churchill's The Second World War and a slew of historical masterpieces about special aspects of that war.

One that I haven't cracked yet � but look forward to � is a Russian writer's contemporary coverage of the USSR's war with Germany (A Writer At War). One that I've barely cracked and dread reading is Adolf's Mein Kampf. William L Shirer's three books about his special experiences of that era (The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Nightmare Years) are classics that belong on the often-visited shelves of everyone who wants to know and understand that war.

Len Deighton's "Bomber: Events Relating to the Last Flight of an RAF over Germany on the Night of June 31, 1943." is in a class by itself....

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/custome...155&s=books

A phenomenal work of fact-based fiction. Deighton interviewed hundreds of Veterans on both sides, and it shows. As much as a work of fiction, it is a vast compendium of technical trivia from the decisions of German firefighters on the ground during raids, to the technical maintenance of those Lancs back on the ground in England, as well as the ins and outs of flying such diverse aircraft as Spitfire reconnaisances planes, Mosquito pathfinders, the Lancs bombers themselves and the Ju-88 nightfighters sent up to shoot them down.

Birdwatcher

Two of my favorites are:

�The Dead Are Mine� by James E. Ross (graves registration at Anzio).

�Comrades of War� by Sven Hassel (while not entirely fiction it is a stylized description of life in a German Penal Battalion on the Eastern Front).

A similar non-fiction work that parallels the above is �The Forgotten Soldier� by Guy Sajar.

While not a WWII book does anyone enjoy reading the book: �Line of Fire� by Donald Hamilton?

Anything by Ken Follett...

My favorites:
Jackdaws
Hornet Flight
Eye of the Needle
Key to Rebecca