the year in books [I]

The first installment of this year's Reading Gauntlet is a series of history books. The first (and the best of the bunch) was Martin Gilbert's The Somme, an excellent treatment on that months-long slaughterhouse during the Great War. The next four books are focused on the Second World War: two are histories and two are firsthand accounts. Pacific Air recounts the history of the aerial war in the Pacific Theater, and Landing in Hell is a short treatment of the Battle of Pelileu. Every Man a Hero is the memoir of a medic who fought in Africa, Italy, and who was gravely wounded on Normandy. I Marched with Patton is the memoir of an engineer who served with Patton during his push to the outskirts of Berlin.