Tuesday 1 July 2014

I'm back from a week at the Jersey Shore and I find that you guys have posted a lot of great stuff about Patton's Gap - much more than I would have expected.  Congratulations all around.

Now about the book:  "...founded on years of painstaking research" promises Ivor Williams in his back cover blurb.  Brian, I was happy to see your posts that essentially call the book for precisely lacking that very thing.   The sources cited and quoted were more an attempt to praise Patton and bury Montgomery so that the final line of the book carried some sense of shock.  As if you couldn't see that coming.

Brian: your point about the title bothered me the whole time I was reading - to make it work it should have ended with a question mark, but since no one else seems to have ever referred to it as Patton's Gap, even that wouldn't have made sense.

Chris: halfway through the book I started doing some searching to find out more about the Falaise Gap - was it really such a contentious part of the Normandy Invasion?  No one else thinks so - I couldn't find anything outside this book that makes such a deal out of it.  Not that this is the first book to try and stake a claim for a historical moment and sell a new take on it, but in this case it just added to the dullness.

I have nothing much more to add, since you both said it so well. 

6 comments:

  1. Welcome back, Stan.

    Did you read your Rohmer on the beach? I've just started Retaliation and world leaders are already speaking English as a Second Language dialogue about Canadian investment law while shadowy interests are cooking up very big -- possibly huge! -- plans to take over a company by buying it with money.

    And the President of the United States is still getting his news from reading the paper.

    Rohmer is BACK!

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  2. Oddly enough, it didn't really seem like a beach book once I was on an actual beach.

    Am I wrong or is Retaliation his longest book yet?

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  3. Retaliation is easily the longest, but the real question is whether it will seem the longest.

    I'm beginning to think the answer to that one is also "yes".

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  4. Is Retaliation longer than BALLS!? I can't tell, because, being a modern reader on the go, some I've enjoyed on the Ipad.

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  5. Hey, you know, I think Chris might be right. Balls! looks to have approximately 99,700 words, while Retaliation has somewhere around 95,200.

    Yep, I figured it out.

    What fun!

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  6. I'm 120 pages in and it seems to read really fast.

    So I'm no longer scared by the record page count.

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