I finished reading John Keegan's The Second World War over Christmas recess (my daily journal is dotted with my journey: the Eastern Front, North Africa, the Ardennes, Midway...). I am humbled by the events themselves as well as by the ambition of the book. Be sure to ask me about my experience of reading it.
My footnote is that I read it with my recently borrowed iPod from the School Library System by my armchair. And I must say it provided a helpful supplement to the text and illustrations. I looked up many geographical features that shaped the conflicts; the benchmark rivers of the eastern front: Oder, Dnieper, Vistula and their compliments in the West; the Burma Road and "moat" around Singapore, the narrow coastal corridor that hosted the bulk of tank battles in North Africa; as well as foreign phrases, new vocabulary words, and a host of pacts, agreements, conferences. I also think I finally have the battalion-regiment-division numbers clear in my mind. And if nothing else, it kept me from swallowing whole the overwhelming surge of statistics, facts, and data laying siege to my skepticism, that ally.
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