The Miracle of Dunkirk: The True Story of Operation Dynamo
Walter Lord
History
Walter Lord was one of the greatest narrative historians of the 20th century. The Miracle of Dunkirk isn't up there with his best work (such as A Night to Remember, Day of Infamy, and especially Incredible Victory), but it's still pretty good. It has the trademark Lord style: beautifully readable, extensively researched, and absolutely packed with vivid first-person detail. It doesn't quite cohere into a single overarching narrative--there are so many viewpoints that the book takes on a fractured, impressionistic quality. In an odd way, though, that's appropriate to the subject matter. In a battle nobody had planned for, a national emergency that seemingly arose from nowhere in the course of a few days, there could be no coordinating genius and no overall architecture of salvation . . . only a series of improvisations, enough of which somehow worked.
This would be a good book to read if you saw last year's rather peculiar movie Dunkirk and wanted to actually, you know, learn something.
If music is your thing, do not miss James Keelaghan's song "Fires of Calais".
I think you mean "Plague in Calais" or maybe I misremember.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I did watch the film Dunkirk, and it was pretty blah. Pretty, but lacking in content.
Dunkirk was clever, only not in a good way. The gimmick of showing the same event from three different viewpoints is cute, but a gimmick is a gimmick. The near-total lack of dialogue is self-consciously artsy. I suppose that the decision to focus on the small-scale, individual story at the expense of the larger context is a legitimate artistic choice, but I didn't much enjoy the results.
ReplyDeleteDid you see Darkest Hour? I liked that much better, with the exception of one scene.
I did not see Darkest Hour. I have heard of it, but now I have a reason to watch it.
DeleteIt's one of those movies that's made or broken by the star's performance. Personally, I thought Gary Oldman blew the doors off. Plus it's fairly historically accurate, within the requirement to tell an entertaining story. Let me know what you think.
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