Charles Glass was the chief Middle East correspondent for
ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in the Middle East,
Africa, and the Balkans. He is the author of Americans in Paris,
Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, and
The Northern Front. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine,
The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The
Independent, and The Spectator. Born in Los Angeles, Glass divides
his time among Paris, Tuscany, and London.
www.charlesglass.net
“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly
fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts… This is a stripped
down, unromanticized, intimate history of battle in all of its
confusion, chaos, terror, and moral ambiguity. Intricately
structured — the author deftly juggles three narrative strands —
and beautifully paced to build suspense, this tightly focused
account, which draws on memoirs, archives, police files,
psychiatric records, is neither reverent nor disapproving.” --The
Boston Globe
"Glass is to be commended for his take on WWII through the eyes of
those who ran away from it... Glass's history might be one of the
best ways of relaying the experience of war: through the eyes of
the young men who charged into the line of fire, gave up the ghost,
and whose only reward was living to tell the tale." --Publishers
Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)
“The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II, by the historian
and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass, thus
performs a service. It’s the first book to examine at length the
sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it
presents are frequently revealing and heartbreaking… The Deserters
has much to say about soldiers' hearts. It underscores the truth of
the following observation, made by a World War II infantry captain
named Charles B. MacDonald: 'It is always an enriching experience
to write about the American soldier in adversity no less than in
glittering triumph.'" --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A veteran correspondent in war zones, Glass is richly credentialed
to write The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. He is
qualified by talent, by the good fortune of finding surviving
veterans, and by exploring their lives with diligence and, most
crucially, a deep compassion… Glass tells the soldiers' stories
with novelistic vividness and a good historian's grasp of research
detail." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Glass brings something new to the table by going deep with
desertion, an overlooked aspect of the wartime experience. The
result is an impressive achievement: a boot-level take on the
conflict that is fresh without being cynically revisionist...
[Glass] pulled off something special here: showing respect to what
the deserters endured while acknowledging that the war—gruesome and
unfair and nonsensical though it was—had to be won, and that this
happened because enough men somehow found the will to keep going."
--The New Republic
"[Q]uite provocative... A well-written, fast-moving treatment of an
issue still relevant today." --Kirkus
"Sensitive and thought-provoking … As this compelling and
well-researched book shows, the battlefield was not a place for
heroes, but a place where young men were dehumanised and killed …
Given such conditions who among us would not also have considered
walking away?" --Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"[These] stories of individual human beings who eventually cracked
under the strain of hardly imaginable fear and misery – are
wonderful, unforgettable acts of witness, something salvaged from a
time already sinking into the black mud of the past." --The
Guardian (UK)
"Gripping … painstaking … sympathetic … Glass reveals just how
inglorious war really is." --Times (UK)
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