Hi; This was the featured story on C-span Monday night. Ron Pyle Ernie Pyle's War : America's Eyewitness to World War II by James E. Tobin Hardcover, 304 pages Published by Free Pr Publication date: June 1, 1997 Dimensions (in inches): 9.55 x 6.42 x 1.10 ISBN: 0684836424 List: $25.00 ~ Our Price: $17.50 ~ You Save: $7.50 (30%) Availability: This item usually ships within 2-3 days. (You can always remove it later...) Check out these titles! Readers who bought Ernie Pyle's War : America's Eyewitness to World War II also bought: •The Adirondacks : A History of America's First Wilderness; Paul Schneider •Memories of Summer : When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game; Roger Kahn •The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Edward R. Tufte Browse other History titles. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reviews and Commentary for Ernie Pyle's War : America's Eyewitness to World War II Have you read this book? Write an online review and share your thoughts with other readers. Amazon.com Books: When World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle left for the Pacific Theater in 1945, he told friends and colleagues that he felt sure he would die there. Pyle was right; on April 18th, a Japanese machine gunner killed one of America's most beloved personalities, sending the entire nation into shock and mourning. In the years since Pyle's death, his particular brand of journalism has been criticized: he's been accused of ignoring the stupidity of generals, of downplaying the horror of battle, and of presenting the war in a better light than it actually deserved to be portrayed. James Tobin, author of the impressive biography Ernie Pyle's War, does not deny that his subject often smoothed the jagged facts of war, but he provides both the context--an era and a war in which correspondents were expected to be "team players" who helped their side to win hearts and minds at home--and the personal conflict raised for Pyle by the often irreconcilable demands of telling the truth and building morale. In addition to detailing Pyle's mostly unhappy personal life, Tobin also includes samples of his columns, proving once and for all that Pyle was more than just a hick who fell into reporting; the man had real, substantial talent, evidenced by his ability to put words together and his sensitivity to the subjects he wrote about. More than just a biography, Ernie Pyle's War is also a study of war, and the peculiar, twilight world of suffering and half-told truths to which men like Ernie Pyle were drawn. From Kirkus Reviews, 03/15/97: From Detroit News reporter Tobin, the definitive biography of this country's great WW II war correspondent. There was little in Ernie Pyle's background to suggest greatness. Born in 1900 in Indiana to an unsuccessful farmer, Pyle grew into a small, quiet man with a tendency to hypochondria. He dropped out of Indiana University in 1923 to accept a job as a reporter for the LaPorte Herald. Later that year, he made the leap to big-city journalism with a job at the Washington Daily News. In the capital, he met Geraldine Siebolds, whom he married in 1925. After a peripatetic period, he became a widely read roving columnist for the Scripps-Howard papers. According to Tobin, covering the war allowed Pyle to escape from a disintegrating marriage. Reporting on Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, he swiftly became a favorite of the soldiers, as his columns portrayed the war from the standpoint of the average GI rather than that of the generals: Pyle faithfully relayed messages from soldiers to their families, mentioned soldiers by name in his columns, and shaped America's image of the Good War (as Tobin shows, Pyle was both oppressed and exhilarated by the war but was often unable to get his darker images of war past the military censors). Exhausted after several years in the European theater, he basked in homefront glory (he wrote two bestselling books, had an audience with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a movie was made about his life) before leaving again to report on the Pacific War. Insisting on covering the invasion of Okinawa from the front lines, he was killed by a Japanese machine gun on the beach at Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. Tobin's account is a balanced tribute to the quintessential war correspondent: In his ability to make war come alive and at the same time show its human side, Pyle was never to be bettered by any of the generation of war correspondents that followed. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. The New York Times Book Review, Malcolm W. Browne: This is the portrait of a complex, enormously gifted but tortured writer ... It is undoubtedly the best biography of Ernie Pyle ever written, but it is much more; few books about combat journalism have so vividly depicted the fascinating interactions between war correspondents, soldiers, and the folks back home. Synopsis: Ernie Pyle's fearless dispatches from the front lines during World War II etched his name forever in the hearts and minds of Americans as the great chronicler of the common soldier's experience. Based on hundreds of interviews and previously untouched archives on Pyle's life and work, this definitive biography offers the first full account of what John Steinbeck called "Ernie Pyle's War." of photos. Customer Comments sdklein1@juno.com, 05/29/97, rating=10: So fascinating, I read the footnotes! This book was thoroughly researched. It offers a satisfying mix of information about Ernie Pyle, along with his own published words. I not only ended up with a real feel for Ernie Pyle, I also understood my parents' wartime experiences better. I'm buying it for my father and father-in-law, both veterans, for Father's Day. They'll love it and their wives, the ones waiting home during WWII reading Ernie's columns, will, too.