Today, those beaches-and Normandy as a whole-are places of tranquil peace and beauty, but back on 6 June 1944 they were the scene of the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted, and one of barely imaginable violence and carnage. But what constitutes “best”? The best work of history? The best memoir of what it was like to be there on that extraordinary day, whether attacker or defender? Or best overview that tells the reader everything he or she needs to know about what happened, how it happened, and why? In this list, I’m attempting to cover all bases: there is balanced analysis but also plenty of human drama, too-after all, it is trying to imagine what it must have been like, whether jumping out of an airplane, or landing craft, or defending a bunker, or flying overhead, or out at sea, or being a civilian caught up in the middle of the invasion, that draws most people to the subject. There are, of course, a very large number of books that have been written about D-Day, but equally, there are unquestionably some that really do stand out above the rest.
0 Comments
To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. She first reads them at “nine, ten, eleven years old”, and is consumed with reading “iet tips for teens, staring at the paper doll figures of clean, hairless, grinning girls” (Hornbacher 44). Beauty magazines are a motif throughout the narrative and symbolize her lust of having a body that is unrealistic. She argues this by showing the effects of the media’s portrayal of unattainable body images on young women, the consequences of a father who is not able to understand his daughter growing up, and the imbalance of power between the genders.Īs a woman growing up at the end of the 20th century, the female gender was faced with many more ideals of the “perfect body” than males. She demonstrates that her illness was a result of the patriarchal culture that she lived in, and not her biology. Her experience is greatly influenced by the fact that she is a woman in a repressive society. Marya Hornbacher’s memoir Wasted was published when she was only twenty one years old, and describes her struggle with eating disorders throughout her adolescence. |