The book was originally published in 2002 and is a worthwhile overview of D-Day in thirty-two pages so it won't take long to read. What separates it from other books about the invasion are the photos and pull-outs of historical artefacts from the event, neither of which really add to the feel of the occasion. Several pages have large photos used as background with the text overprinted and making it hard to read. Other photos run across the top of each page, all the same size and some of these really should have been larger to show the detail.
The pull-out items are sort of hit and miss. A map of the French coast has reduced so much from the real map making it impossible to read anything and there are additions to show where the troops landed, the New York Times front page for June 6 has been printed on grey paper instead of white, a four page facsimile of the Omaha Beach landing with hand drawn maps and text is unreadable because of huge reduction from the original and the text has been printed as a picture rather than black type. The only interesting item from the pull-outs is twenty-four page booklet called 'A pocket guide to France', produced by the Pentagon and given to the troops.
The rather poor, bland nature of the book was bought home me when I compared it with 'The D-Day experience' (ISBN 1844428052) by Richard Holmes and published in 2004. The format is similar, sixty-six pages but beautifully designed with lots of very readable pull-out material and a CD-ROM (with twenty-six tracks lasting seventy-four minutes) so you listen to the voices of veterans who were there and experienced the invasion. It's a large book and comes in a slipcase.
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