(I read this in The Price of War omnibus.)

4.5/5 Stars

Heartfelt, original, and magnificent; I’m baffled by how underrated this series is.

Usually in a series—doesn’t matter what the genre is—there’s a tendency where I wish some of the characters would just die because they just don’t provide anything to the main storyline; or maybe just utterly boring and infuriating (I’m looking at you, Isana from Codex Alera). This is not the case with this series, I did think that way towards several characters in the first book but this installment proves me wrong; they were all necessary. Abraham smartly used every knowledge that the readers have accumulated from the first book to create a sense of connection with the world and the characters; especially in their personality complexity and believability. Abraham’s characterizations are wonderful and felt real, ever since the second book, whether it’s new or returning characters, each of their journey was compelling and simply unpredictable.

the title said, the third installment in the Long Price Quartet is where war finally happened between the Khaeim and the Galtic empire. Surprisingly, beneath all the conflicts, the power of Abraham’s character-driven stories as he weaved a tale of war that’s highly original with tons of relatable message and topics spread throughout the pages. Three of the most often occurring themes within this book is parenthood, acceptance/regrets of our past decisions, and the horror of war. It’s been another 15 years since the end of the second book and Otah-Machi, our main character, is now 48 years old. After decades of scheming and political battles, the war with the Galt empire is finally here. An Autumn War is technically the most action-packed—though they are still very low in quantity—book in the series, it’s also the most emotional as Abraham managed to show the price of war articulately. Take a read at this passage:

"You're talking of slaughtering a nation. Thousands of innocent people destroyed, lands made barren, mountains leveled and the sea pulled up over them a blanket. And you're feeling sorry for yourself that you had to wring a bird's neck as a boy? How can anyone have feelings that delicate and that numbed both at the same time?”

The last five chapters of this book were completely pulse-pounding. Even though the action scenes were done in minimum, the scale was epic, the stakes of the war are enormous, and these chapters made me grit my teeth and emotional; the slow story buildup towards the climax sequences pays off magnificently.

Picture: An Autumn War by zippo514



I don’t know how this series will end from here, my for this series so far has been pretty short in comparison to my usual but it’s really hard to go into full detail without spoiling stuff because of the series originality and unpredictability. If the fourth book of the series somehow ends up being even better than this, The Long Price Quartet will without question be included in my small list of favorite series of all time. I highly recommend this to anyone who’s okay with almost zero action scenes and are looking for an original adult fantasy series with a lot of Eastern influences.

You can find this and the rest of my Adult Epic/High Fantasy & Sci-Fi at BookNestfavorites121 s Jimmy154 590

4.544 s Mayim de Vries577 981

This was brilliant. Heartbreaking but brilliant. Also vicious. Still brilliant, if you get my meaning.

The third book in the Longest Price Quartet is neither about cotton or mining industry nor about betrayals and conspiracies (well, maybe a bit); it is mainly about war and other things even worse than book-burning. The intrigue grows in scale and the spins out of control. War is hell waged to escape the fears of what might happen, magic is a weapon of mass destruction. It is not about individual fates anymore. The world is at stake.

“One simple death is the best we can hope for, sometimes. If it saves the world.”

Otah, a ruler by necessity, has governed Machi for past 14 years. He has been forced to assume a role that placed him somewhere between the manager and a demigod (Khai means a servant after all). Years of ceremony and negotiations and court gossip worn him down but didn’t break him; he still refuses to follow the traditions blindly and so instead of having a cohort of wives he is married to one woman only and instead of a healthy flock of offspring that would attempt to kill each other in a bid for power, he has one daughter and one son (and a sickly one at that). But now, a time comes when he needs to sacrifice everything he holds dear in order to protect everything he has been questioning his whole life.

For the ever-expanding Galtic empire, the cities of the Khaiem amount to the anathema. Their schemes aimed at the destruction of the andat, previously thwarted, are about to bear fruit at last. It is possible thanks to a renegade poet, but mainly thanks to one man, general Balasar Gice. Man, ridden so hard by his personal demons that what he planned is not a simple war (don’t be deceived by the title). What he planned, is the end of the world.

The figure of Balasar has been superbly written; this single-minded Galt, physically unprepossessing but of an immense charisma and terrifying strategic mind reminded me of Napoleon in the way he is leading by example or believes that battles are won or lost long before they are fought.

“At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing and then did it.”

But so is Otah, whether what needs doing is killing a man, taking a throne or waging a war. The clash between these two personalities is one of the main axes the book revolves around. Sparks fly, but equally, tears fall and blood flows. Otah’s transformation is interesting to observe: how he negotiates and compromises between lofty ideals of his youth and the pragmatic considerations of his maturity. Admittedly, Mr Abraham also tries to paint Balasar in different hues to escape the image of a straightforward villain. In fact, what we get is a man of integrity, intelligence, and vision. Sometimes, it is hard to place him as an antagonist at all.

For Balasar the andat are a dangerous tool, an ever-looming threat over the head of the Galts or indeed, the whole humanity. Andat are terrifying because they are so inhuman, I agree. Potentially they are lethal, I agree. This power renders them too dangerous to be entrusted to people with weak hearts and fickle consciences, but firstly, they were never an instrument of slaughter made in fear or hatred, and secondly, there was a careful education system in place.

And yet, at the same time, since the first instalment we have read about the aggressive Galts always trying to inflict some minor or major harm onto the Khaiem, always intriguing, conquering, and messing around. And the city-states themselves? Rich beyond measure? Sure. Spoiled? No doubt about it. Assured of their own greatness? Absolutely. But at the same time totally benign. No ideas of conquest, no armies (!), no remote interest in subjugating the other.

And then this little spiteful man comes driven by his paranoia and employs a full-fledged genocide as a preemptive strike. Well, excuse me. It is as if I exterminated the whole spider population in Africa because well I don't them that much and they are potentially dangerous to me and the ones I love.

No.

No. No. No.

[the rest is obscenities]


Needless to say, I found it hard to accept this reasoning and agree with the premises it has been built on. Every time Balasar was given voice to verbalise his hopes and fears, I wanted to kick him in straight into his double-standarded righteousness. I ended the book knowing that I hate the Galt general and Balasar Gice in particular. I really don't think Mr Abraham can ever redeem them for me.

However, the book is more than the clash of these two titans. I love how Mr Abraham wastes nothing. Not a single motif or a character is forgotten. There is Maati torn between his calling to be a poet and his desire to be a father. Liat, the long-lost lover, makes an appearance as she has been busy these long years, running a house that had been founded to keep watch on the duplicity of the ever-scheming Galts. She brings her son whom fatherhood is shrouded in mystery. There is Otah’s daughter’, half a girl, not quite half a woman yet, already fiendishly smart and independent. The jungle of feelings between parents and children, the motif of a family, of things worth sacrificing for and things that cannot be saved, are also important aspects of many individual arcs. And underlining it all, the reader will find the question of the price we are willing (or unwilling but forced) to pay, and then pay again.

Regardless of the one star killed by Balasar Gice, I have to say that the Autumn War is the best book in the whole set. Well written, repeatedly punching the reader in the most vulnerable places. The closing of chapter 15 and the opening of 16 was viciously brilliant (wait for it!). But, again I need to underline that Mr Abraham surprised me with his grand design. And as much as I can dis the way he developed the story, or have a preferred alternative, I cannot argue with his version because it has both depth and sense that goes beyond mere neatness. Check yourself.


Also in the series:

1. A Shadow in Summer ????
2. A Betrayal in Winter ?????
4. The Price of Spring ???40 s Scott Hitchcock785 232

Another phenomenal book in this series and the best so far. I'm still in love with all the eastern culture and how subtly it's projected. The characters are just so real as are their emotions and interactions.

The horrors of war are not sugar coated in this book nor are they stylized or heroic. They are a brutal reality. The ending of this book was wise brutal on a different scale and completely unforeseen. The horror of what they had wrought and the scale of grief it represented was chilling.

If book #4 is as good as the first three this will be a top #5 series all time for me. It's probably not for everybody as it's not an Arnold or Stallone movie in book form but the subtle complexities of the human interaction coupled with his smooth writing style make it a winner for me. 5-stars historical-fiction steampunk25 s David Sven288 472

I had trouble motivating myself to pick this up each reading session. I think I'm all Abrahammed out at the moment.

The central and cool concept of the Andat was all done in the first book and it hasn't really developed much further from there. The Khaiem and the system of succession by attrition was explored in the second book and that was interesting

This book the Galts play there master stroke and there is war as the title suggests. It should be the best book so far - but it just didn't grab my attention as much as the other two. I think the jumps in time between books don't help. I feel I'm reading about characters who have undergone changes off stage and they aren't the same people I connected with earlier.

I'm not sure if I want to continue on to the last book at this stage. Not because this book was so bad - but this book ends at a place where I don't need to see how the rest will play out. I could end the series here and guess at what the future will be.

I might read some other books in between and then see if I feel finding out where the characters end up in the aftermath of the events in this book.

3 stars.fantasy18 s Jake Bishop303 404

Another very good entry in The Long Price Quartet. This book benefits so much from the previous entries in terms of how the past has set up long term relationships. The foundation for this book is so solid that it allows Abraham to go with a much more eventful, plot focused book while still having character depth, and really complex relationships.

the last book this one had a very compelling antagonist PoV, although personally I think I prefer the antagonist in A Betrayal In Winter.

Also, the resolution for this book was just very good, hard to even describe it more specifically without risking spoilers, but it was not what I expected, but made a ton of sense in hindsight, it was impactful, and set up a lot more interesting conflict for The Price of Spring.

Lots of people find this to be a significant step up from A Betrayal In Winter, but to me they are on about the same level. This is more epic, and the stakes are higher, and it probably has a better ending, but I prefer the scheming, and the antagonist in A Betrayal in Winter. Both are excellent.

8.8/1017 s Lee351 221

It will be difficult to go into any detail about this book without getting into spoilers, It is book 3 out of 4 after all.

Needless to say, this entire story creeps up on you and then completely hooks you in. I felt book one was an interesting story, but book 3....wow... I literally could not put it down. A late night reading became a very late night, because I just had to find out the ending. The pressure during the story kept building and building, the pace was brilliant and i got so antsy about what was coming that I found myself speeding up during the non essential paragraphs and had to stop myself glancing ahead.

The basic story premise is there are poets in the world, who can describe an idea and bind that idea into a mini god. This mini god is called an Andat and only one race of people have them. Given that the Andats can be beings 'stone made soft' means that they wield incredible power, the power holds all the power with his control over the Andat, so if you want to dig a mine for raw materials, well poet will come and make stone butter. It of course scares the shit out of the neighbours as your poet could from his bedroom turn an entire nation into quicksand and sink everyone in it.

That is as far as I am going, because everything else will spoil. I am definitely recommending this to all my fantasy buddies. By the time you get to book three you will be an absolute fan.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED SERIES!15 s Allen Walker186 1,418

Holy. Crap.

Full review: https://youtu.be/qYcEtddjZgA16 s Margret142 72

Very good and emotional. Daniel Abraham is best when he's portraying the true cost of war14 s Grace Dionne309 254

Re-reading this has cemented it as one of my favourite books of all time

This book was absolutely incredible. Video discussion will be coming at some point soon :)2021 202315 s Mark1,030 79

A lot of the time you read fantasy the book ends up being some world-traveling epic. Lots of the second half of the Wheel of Time series, for instance, seemed to be making a checklist of all of the assorted nations that the action had not been to yet, and going to those places. Lots of politics, lots of tertiary characters, sad yarns spun. It's automatically epic if a half-sketched world is threatened, right?

Some wars are fought between good and evil. Some wars are just fought because two sides, neither of whom is entirely good or evil, end up fighting. In the third volume of The Long Price Quartet, it is the latter sort of war. The distant Galts come invading, because it turns out there is a general who is very interested in the world not having andats any more, a stance which is not indefensible. Only the Khai Machi, our old friend Otah, who has spent another fourteen years or so being an eccentric part of the Khaiem, has any interest in envisioning a post-andat world, and so he becomes the nemesis, because it turns out that when you have magical beings that are largely used for commerce but can be used for aggressive purposes as well, there's not a whole lot of need to maintain a standing army.

This is cool to see play out. A strength of this series is multiple complex characters, perhaps because there have been years (in world time) between books for them to develop conflicting motivations. They get along, or don't, and what they've been through matters, and sometimes they change, sometimes they rise to the occasion. Or they don't. War is messy. Anyway, sometimes I see praise heaped upon characters for being complex when they're one-dimensional with one or two token backstory bits to differentiate them and this is about as boring as one-dimensional characters. Daniel Abraham has actual human beings for characters and it's awesome.

There are gobs of fantasy series out there that sprawl and turn into gigantic messes. I've read and d my share of them, but seriously, sometimes, goddamn. Goodreads notes that the hardcover edition of An Autumn War was 366 pages. That is a tightly-packed, fast-paced story with its share of action that is nonetheless character-driven. Choices are made that matter, without the prose wanking at us about how much those choices matter. Scenery is painted vividly but briefly. The whole "took a pose" thing mercifully blends in with the rest of the scenery.

Basically, take all the good parts of 21st century fantasy stuff and then remove all the parts that suck but you just kinda put up with them because fantasy is fun. Then you get the Long Price Quartet. And it's finished! Right now I can go read the next book, which is the last book! Amazing.fantasy13 s Chris Haught586 237

This was brilliant at times. At others, it dragged a little. But even when it was moving slowly, I enjoyed it.

I'm really starting to some of these characters. New ones, and the ones carried over from the earlier books. Abraham writes them so well that love or hate them, they're worth reading about. Or listening, in this case. The audiobook performance of Neil Shah was perfect for this book. At first I wasn't sure at all I d him, but after a couple of chapters his voice molded to the story. And his character voices are perfect.

I really need to see where this series will go from here. One more book and it's over. The way this one has built up to it, I think I'm in for a real treat.2015-dark-room-challenge 2015-series-challenge audiobook ...more13 s Rob863 572

Executive Summary: Best one yet. More action than the previous two, but again the emphasis is character driven political conflicts.

Audio book: Neil Shah continues to be a good, but not great narrator. It makes audio a viable option, but far from a must listen.

Full Review
I continue to be impressed with Mr. Abraham. Each book continues to improve on the previous one.

This one has more action than the previous ones, but again the main focus is on the politics of the Khaiem, and raises the stakes with it's conflict with Galt.

The best part of this series continues to be it's characters. In this book, my particular favorites are the new antagonist Balasar and the mercenary captain Sinjah (or however you spell it).

I bounce from despising Balasar to starting to him, or to remember how misguided and hateful he is being. And the actions of Sinjah kept me guessing the whole time. Both are very complex characters that relish in the shades of grey Mr. Abraham seems to be so good at.

I must also add I had no idea where this book was going to end up. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out at least the broad strokes of most stories. This one, not so much. I will say, I'm glad I have the time to jump right into book 4, because I just had to know what would happen next.

As this is the third book in a series, there isn't much else I can say without getting into spoiler territory for either this book or the two previous ones.

This has easily been the best of the series thus far, and if the trend continues, I'm in for an excellent ending.audio-book author-male fantasy ...more12 s Sarah Aubert538 357

My favourite of the series so far. Abraham is a masterful character writer and it's so satisfying to see small moments from the first book reverberate through the narrative. I'll save my in-depth thoughts for our upcoming discussion, but this series just gets better with each instalment. 11 s Justine1,201 325

This is an easy 5 star rating for me. Abraham weaves a tale of war and heartbreak with signature skill. Finally in book three, we see the female characters stepping to the fore, and as expected, their involvement feels necessary and natural to the evolution of the story. One of the best (and most impressive) parts of the story arc as a whole has been seeing the characters change and mature.

What I most about Abraham's characters has always been their reality - they do not act perfect archetypes, they act the flawed people they are. It makes them more interesting because you can't always rely on them to do the "right" thing, or even to know what the "right" thing is for that matter. That hasn't changed in this book. We still see the characters struggling with their humanity, their inability to control their world, their wants and desires, and the people they love and cherish.

On the writing itself, there were so many small moments that were captured in this book so perfectly. I find that is something of a rarity, and it made reading this book a particular pleasure.2015-read11 s Eh?Eh!385 4

...that feeler explodes. Um, not a spoiler to say it's a big ol' war (see book title).

This book begins maybe another 10 years later. A rival nation, maybe based on England with its pale skinned people and steam engines, and a general determined to remove andats by wiping out the poets and their libraries. With a ploy that's a little too convenient for my taste, the general blitzkriegs the Summer Cities. War is hell, the locals attempt guerilla warfare, and a finally a love triangle I dig - more because it's barely there, viewed through screens, not in-your-face. The general ends up at the northernmost city from the previous book where the last remaining poets attempt to harness an andat. Oh man, another wow! scene where the result devastates both nations and that part about half-breeds, excellent.

I remember the word bacon appeared on page 138. Sinja and his line near the end, yay!

Amazing set-up for the last book.babble-added weep10 s Lema192 96

My first favorite book of 2018 and the book that would add this quartet to the rank of my FAVORITE SERIES OF ALL TIME.

Man, let me start out by saying that EVERYONE should read this book!
But Lema, you didn't give the full 5 stars to the first two? (You can see here the for Book 1 and Book 2)
Well I was an IGNORANT FOOL BACK THEN! ok not really, it's just that this book is everything and it's totally worth it to read the first two just to get to this one (true they can be a bit slow, but they are short with excellent writing and plots and each one surpasses its predecessor by miles and miles).

Again, remember when I was complaining about the detachment I felt in book 1, well it's all all the lacking emotions has been packed tightly in this one, I swear I had misty eyes at some interaction every other page, and the climax? oooh the climax, the battle scenes was so well done, it came close to something out of the Stormlight Archives or the Faithful and the Fallen, yes THAT good, with the added bonus of this being my constant state of mind for 100 pages straight (you can ask Petrik, I was wailing the whole way through :P)



Another way that I want to describe this book is being beautiful inside out, the cover is just magical, and this one focuses a lot more than the previous ones on themes of family love, friendship, devotion and loyalties and urgh my heart just thinking about it *clutches chest*, you find yourself rooting for freaking everyone, and all sides of conflict. The characters, after following them for the past almost 30 years of their lives, have become my family and I now love every single one of them, I find their joy is mine and their sorrow is sadly mine as well.

I just can't praise this book enough, just do yourself a favor and buy the beautiful bindups of every 2 novels. Kylie, girl I owe you for this wonderful recommendation :')fantasy favorites7 s Scott385 22

I probably say this in all my of Abraham's books but I'm so impressed with his writing. There's nothing wasted in these books; each chapter, each paragraph, each word feels meticulously planned to create the desired affect. His stories truly feel alive

And not only that but his characters always feel honest and human. There are no perfect people in this world, who always do the exact right thing at the right moment. There are people who love, who hate, who make mistakes, who attempt to better themselves. Very three dimensionalfantasy7 s Robyn827 159

That did not end the way I thought it would, and I think that's a good thing. In many ways, I think this has been the most relatable book of the series - for the most part, the characters feel extremely real and the world remains utterly vibrant. I was thankful for the Galt POV this time around, but at the same time I continue to find their motivations very obscure. (To offer advice in hindsight, I think Abraham should have been including them from the very beginning.) It would appear, though, that I remain quite happy to read anything Abraham writes.



20157 s Joanne675 80

The 3rd book in a quartet and one of the best fantasy books I have read. The entire series has been fantastic, but this 3rd book took it to a whole new level for me.

Daniel Abraham is a master of characterization. There are so many layers underneath these people he has created. Also, the world he has built (based on the Far East) is so unique, along with the magic system. What an imagination!

The title basically tells you that this book is about a war. Abraham does not sugar coat the horrors of war torn countries, he makes it very real and heart-wrenching. Nothing is sugar coated.

If you enjoy High Fantasy, I highly recommend this series and author.fantasy-read series-finished6 s Mike440 106

Holy shit.

Holy SHIT.

Next book please.6 s Campbell561

I this series. I really this series. It's fantasy, but not as you know it. No dragons, no flashy magical pyrotechnics, no annoying youthful protagonists who become puissant practitioners of High Art.

Instead we have the mundane, mercantile Empire of Galt facing off against the exotic, Ottoman-esque Khaiem city states with their pet Djinn (known here as 'Andat') and the Poets who both wield then and keep them from destroying the world.

The world-building is particularly well thought-out.fantasy fiction5 s Socialteaist240 4

This was amazing and beautiful and tragic.5-star fantasy5 s Birte741 33

I have finally finished this book. Although I've enjoyed it more than the first two entries in this series, it still took me forever to read this because I was never motivated to read it.

One of the reasons for that is just, that I'm not really invested in any of the characters and even the plot couldn't interest me that much. But that sounds a bit too negative than my experience actually was.

I did really the story, just how it was sometimes told didn't sit right with me. And the fact that I didn't the characters didn't help that much. I was interested in them and their choices but not just for the character's sake. This was still so far my favourite of the series so far, because there were a lot of stakes and choices to be made, which were hard and sometimes kinda stupid, but it was very realistic and thinking of all the consequences was an intriguing concept.5 s Stephen1,516 11.6k

4.5 to 5.0 stars. This is the third book of the Long Price Quartet following A Shadow in Summer and A Betrayal in Winter. It is also the strongest and best book in a series that is fast becoming one of the best in recent years.

Following the events in A Betrayal in Winter, war is brewing between the Galts and Khaiem. The Galts are led by a brilliant and daring general named Balasar Gice who has a plan to remove the one great advantage of the Khaiem...namely the poets and their magical andat. Meanwhile, Otah (now Khai Machi) and Maati prepare for the inevitable war with Galt, a war they can not win without unleashing the andat on the Galtic cities.

What ensues is a superbly written piece of epic fantasy that moves along at a breakneck pace with believable and interesting characters and one of the most unique and imaginative magic systems in recent years (i.e., the poets and the andat). What I particularly d about this story is that General Gice was a POV character and you were able to see and understand his motivations for the war and come to respect him as someone who beleived in what he was doing. No black/white good guy/bad guy , but rather well-fleshed out individuals with complex motivations. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!

2006-2010 dark-and-gritty ebooks ...more5 s Penny -Thecatladybooknook637 31

Updating this to all FIVE STARS after finishing the series.

4.5 rounding to 5....I may edit and give a solid 5 stars but I want to read The Price of Spring before I make any hard decisions.

This series...WOW!!! (Ryan, you need to read this PRONTO!! LOL) Yes, it starts out slower in Book 1 but the end of that book was SO GOOD!!! Book 2 built on what had happened 14 years prior and felt a bit faster paced to me. Then here comes book 3 and I've been having to save my stars to rate this book and the next one!

This book has just the right amount of battle, of battle planning, of politics, of backstabbing and I was a nervous wreck the whole way through this book. I can't wait to read the Price of Spring to see how this all ends up. HIGHLY recommend this series if you great writing and prose, and are fine with a slower paced story with big bang!fantasy own5 s Kylie134 153

Honestly, this book series is so underrated. It is really fantastic and also the writing is beautiful and gives us a unique look at our characters. This magic that I've thought was so interesting for two books made me turn against it and hate its existence. Ridiculous! I've never changed my mind about something big that in a book. Ever! Cannot wait for the last installment in this companion book Quartet.
Edit two minutes after I posted this: I enjoyed the first book for its un-epic-ness but as the series goes on, the books get bigger and more epic in scale and I love it! Something to love for every fantasy lover I feel . 5 s Barry283 19

4.5 Star.

Un the first two books, where I felt the plots were too convoluted just for the sake of being convoluted, I really thought the plot in this third book of the Long Price Quartet series to be fairly straightforward. I knew and expected, based on the title, to see the long-awaited war between the Galts and the Khaiem, and Daniel Abraham delivered. I also absolutely agree with the price of war that Mr. Abraham set for both sides in this war. Masterfully done.

Another element that makes this book so much better than the first two books is the villain. The villain in the first book, while important to introduce us to what the Galts were , was too unremarakble to be a villain. The villain of the second book, while ruthless and memorable, seemingly had nothing to do with the Galts. A wily veteran general with ambiguous morality, high principles, supreme self-confidence, extreme loyalty to his men and surprising humanity, Balasar, on the other hand, is the perfect embodiment of the threats the Galts possess against the Khaiem. An excellent villain.

Despite a bit of a pacing issue in the early going of the book, An Autumn War is a truly satisfying read and the best book of the series, so far. I'm looking forward to continue to the final book of the series, as I still have a few questions that I want answered, hopefully. fantasy favorites4 s Narilka633 46

An Autumn War is the third in Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet. The story kicks things up a notch as the long awaited war between Galt and the Khaiem finally arrives. The result is nothing short of brilliant though I almost gave up on the story due to it's glacial pacing in the first half of the book. Reader be warned: this is not a happy tale. Abraham paints war in all it's horrifying and tragic glory.

Fourteen years have passed and Otah Matchi has settled into his role as Khai for the people of Machi, albeit in a non-traditional manner. He has only one wife, a single son and a single daughter, and has undertaken the training of a standing militia, something not seen in the Khaiem in ages. Most believe it unnecessary with the power of the andat at their side. After all, the Khaiem have used the threat of the andat to ensure peace and prosperity for their people for centuries. Why would this ever change? One Balasar Gice, general of Galt, is about to change everything.

Similar to the previous book, I'm fairly conflicted in my feelings. The first half of the book was a complete slog, taking me 10 days to complete. We spend even more time in the heads of the same characters, almost 30 years later, older but not necessarily wiser. If there was one character I felt truly drawn to this would have been OK. I still haven't connected with anyone in the cast so it makes reading these long sections more of a chore than it might be otherwise.

The second half of the book is completely different. Around chapter 16 plot takes off and I could not put the book down, finishing the remaining chapters in a few hours. The scale of the war is enormous, with an outcome I never saw coming, one that has changed the face of the world. Abraham's writing is elegant. He paints a tragedy that is almost Shakespearean in it's beauty and brilliant in its execution. I am in awe of what he pulled off.

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about Balasar Gice at least a little. He is a wonderfully drawn villain. Rather unimposing physically, Gice is incredibly charismatic, a scary-smart tactician, leads his men by example and is willing to start a war to acheive his goal of ending the threat of the andat, though really the andat are basically a sheathed sword as the Khaiem have no aspirations towards conquering. In the book's own words: “At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing and then did it.” There is nothing scarier than a true believer.

At this point I have no idea what is in store for this world next. I am looking forward to finding out. Just please give me a character to root for!fbr read-in-20194 s Althea Ann2,239 1,102

(I read this in The Price of War omnibus.)

4.5/5 Stars

Heartfelt, original, and magnificent; I’m baffled by how underrated this series is.

Usually in a series—doesn’t matter what the genre is—there’s a tendency where I wish some of the characters would just die because they just don’t provide anything to the main storyline; or maybe just utterly boring and infuriating (I’m looking at you, Isana from Codex Alera). This is not the case with this series, I did think that way towards several characters in the first book but this installment proves me wrong; they were all necessary. Abraham smartly used every knowledge that the readers have accumulated from the first book to create a sense of connection with the world and the characters; especially in their personality complexity and believability. Abraham’s characterizations are wonderful and felt real, ever since the second book, whether it’s new or returning characters, each of their journey was compelling and simply unpredictable.

the title said, the third installment in the Long Price Quartet is where war finally happened between the Khaeim and the Galtic empire. Surprisingly, beneath all the conflicts, the power of Abraham’s character-driven stories as he weaved a tale of war that’s highly original with tons of relatable message and topics spread throughout the pages. Three of the most often occurring themes within this book is parenthood, acceptance/regrets of our past decisions, and the horror of war. It’s been another 15 years since the end of the second book and Otah-Machi, our main character, is now 48 years old. After decades of scheming and political battles, the war with the Galt empire is finally here. An Autumn War is technically the most action-packed—though they are still very low in quantity—book in the series, it’s also the most emotional as Abraham managed to show the price of war articulately. Take a read at this passage:

"You're talking of slaughtering a nation. Thousands of innocent people destroyed, lands made barren, mountains leveled and the sea pulled up over them a blanket. And you're feeling sorry for yourself that you had to wring a bird's neck as a boy? How can anyone have feelings that delicate and that numbed both at the same time?”

The last five chapters of this book were completely pulse-pounding. Even though the action scenes were done in minimum, the scale was epic, the stakes of the war are enormous, and these chapters made me grit my teeth and emotional; the slow story buildup towards the climax sequences pays off magnificently.

Picture: An Autumn War by zippo514



I don’t know how this series will end from here, my for this series so far has been pretty short in comparison to my usual but it’s really hard to go into full detail without spoiling stuff because of the series originality and unpredictability. If the fourth book of the series somehow ends up being even better than this, The Long Price Quartet will without question be included in my small list of favorite series of all time. I highly recommend this to anyone who’s okay with almost zero action scenes and are looking for an original adult fantasy series with a lot of Eastern influences.

You can find this and the rest of my Adult Epic/High Fantasy & Sci-Fi at BookNestfavorites121 s Jimmy154 590

4.544 s Mayim de Vries577 981

This was brilliant. Heartbreaking but brilliant. Also vicious. Still brilliant, if you get my meaning.

The third book in the Longest Price Quartet is neither about cotton or mining industry nor about betrayals and conspiracies (well, maybe a bit); it is mainly about war and other things even worse than book-burning. The intrigue grows in scale and the spins out of control. War is hell waged to escape the fears of what might happen, magic is a weapon of mass destruction. It is not about individual fates anymore. The world is at stake.

“One simple death is the best we can hope for, sometimes. If it saves the world.”

Otah, a ruler by necessity, has governed Machi for past 14 years. He has been forced to assume a role that placed him somewhere between the manager and a demigod (Khai means a servant after all). Years of ceremony and negotiations and court gossip worn him down but didn’t break him; he still refuses to follow the traditions blindly and so instead of having a cohort of wives he is married to one woman only and instead of a healthy flock of offspring that would attempt to kill each other in a bid for power, he has one daughter and one son (and a sickly one at that). But now, a time comes when he needs to sacrifice everything he holds dear in order to protect everything he has been questioning his whole life.

For the ever-expanding Galtic empire, the cities of the Khaiem amount to the anathema. Their schemes aimed at the destruction of the andat, previously thwarted, are about to bear fruit at last. It is possible thanks to a renegade poet, but mainly thanks to one man, general Balasar Gice. Man, ridden so hard by his personal demons that what he planned is not a simple war (don’t be deceived by the title). What he planned, is the end of the world.

The figure of Balasar has been superbly written; this single-minded Galt, physically unprepossessing but of an immense charisma and terrifying strategic mind reminded me of Napoleon in the way he is leading by example or believes that battles are won or lost long before they are fought.

“At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing and then did it.”

But so is Otah, whether what needs doing is killing a man, taking a throne or waging a war. The clash between these two personalities is one of the main axes the book revolves around. Sparks fly, but equally, tears fall and blood flows. Otah’s transformation is interesting to observe: how he negotiates and compromises between lofty ideals of his youth and the pragmatic considerations of his maturity. Admittedly, Mr Abraham also tries to paint Balasar in different hues to escape the image of a straightforward villain. In fact, what we get is a man of integrity, intelligence, and vision. Sometimes, it is hard to place him as an antagonist at all.

For Balasar the andat are a dangerous tool, an ever-looming threat over the head of the Galts or indeed, the whole humanity. Andat are terrifying because they are so inhuman, I agree. Potentially they are lethal, I agree. This power renders them too dangerous to be entrusted to people with weak hearts and fickle consciences, but firstly, they were never an instrument of slaughter made in fear or hatred, and secondly, there was a careful education system in place.

And yet, at the same time, since the first instalment we have read about the aggressive Galts always trying to inflict some minor or major harm onto the Khaiem, always intriguing, conquering, and messing around. And the city-states themselves? Rich beyond measure? Sure. Spoiled? No doubt about it. Assured of their own greatness? Absolutely. But at the same time totally benign. No ideas of conquest, no armies (!), no remote interest in subjugating the other.

And then this little spiteful man comes driven by his paranoia and employs a full-fledged genocide as a preemptive strike. Well, excuse me. It is as if I exterminated the whole spider population in Africa because well I don't them that much and they are potentially dangerous to me and the ones I love.

No.

No. No. No.

[the rest is obscenities]


Needless to say, I found it hard to accept this reasoning and agree with the premises it has been built on. Every time Balasar was given voice to verbalise his hopes and fears, I wanted to kick him in straight into his double-standarded righteousness. I ended the book knowing that I hate the Galt general and Balasar Gice in particular. I really don't think Mr Abraham can ever redeem them for me.

However, the book is more than the clash of these two titans. I love how Mr Abraham wastes nothing. Not a single motif or a character is forgotten. There is Maati torn between his calling to be a poet and his desire to be a father. Liat, the long-lost lover, makes an appearance as she has been busy these long years, running a house that had been founded to keep watch on the duplicity of the ever-scheming Galts. She brings her son whom fatherhood is shrouded in mystery. There is Otah’s daughter’, half a girl, not quite half a woman yet, already fiendishly smart and independent. The jungle of feelings between parents and children, the motif of a family, of things worth sacrificing for and things that cannot be saved, are also important aspects of many individual arcs. And underlining it all, the reader will find the question of the price we are willing (or unwilling but forced) to pay, and then pay again.

Regardless of the one star killed by Balasar Gice, I have to say that the Autumn War is the best book in the whole set. Well written, repeatedly punching the reader in the most vulnerable places. The closing of chapter 15 and the opening of 16 was viciously brilliant (wait for it!). But, again I need to underline that Mr Abraham surprised me with his grand design. And as much as I can dis the way he developed the story, or have a preferred alternative, I cannot argue with his version because it has both depth and sense that goes beyond mere neatness. Check yourself.


Also in the series:

1. A Shadow in Summer ????
2. A Betrayal in Winter ?????
4. The Price of Spring ???40 s Scott Hitchcock785 232

Another phenomenal book in this series and the best so far. I'm still in love with all the eastern culture and how subtly it's projected. The characters are just so real as are their emotions and interactions.

The horrors of war are not sugar coated in this book nor are they stylized or heroic. They are a brutal reality. The ending of this book was wise brutal on a different scale and completely unforeseen. The horror of what they had wrought and the scale of grief it represented was chilling.

If book #4 is as good as the first three this will be a top #5 series all time for me. It's probably not for everybody as it's not an Arnold or Stallone movie in book form but the subtle complexities of the human interaction coupled with his smooth writing style make it a winner for me. 5-stars historical-fiction steampunk25 s David Sven288 472

I had trouble motivating myself to pick this up each reading session. I think I'm all Abrahammed out at the moment.

The central and cool concept of the Andat was all done in the first book and it hasn't really developed much further from there. The Khaiem and the system of succession by attrition was explored in the second book and that was interesting

This book the Galts play there master stroke and there is war as the title suggests. It should be the best book so far - but it just didn't grab my attention as much as the other two. I think the jumps in time between books don't help. I feel I'm reading about characters who have undergone changes off stage and they aren't the same people I connected with earlier.

I'm not sure if I want to continue on to the last book at this stage. Not because this book was so bad - but this book ends at a place where I don't need to see how the rest will play out. I could end the series here and guess at what the future will be.

I might read some other books in between and then see if I feel finding out where the characters end up in the aftermath of the events in this book.

3 stars.fantasy18 s Jake Bishop303 404

Another very good entry in The Long Price Quartet. This book benefits so much from the previous entries in terms of how the past has set up long term relationships. The foundation for this book is so solid that it allows Abraham to go with a much more eventful, plot focused book while still having character depth, and really complex relationships.

the last book this one had a very compelling antagonist PoV, although personally I think I prefer the antagonist in A Betrayal In Winter.

Also, the resolution for this book was just very good, hard to even describe it more specifically without risking spoilers, but it was not what I expected, but made a ton of sense in hindsight, it was impactful, and set up a lot more interesting conflict for The Price of Spring.

Lots of people find this to be a significant step up from A Betrayal In Winter, but to me they are on about the same level. This is more epic, and the stakes are higher, and it probably has a better ending, but I prefer the scheming, and the antagonist in A Betrayal in Winter. Both are excellent.

8.8/1017 s Lee351 221

It will be difficult to go into any detail about this book without getting into spoilers, It is book 3 out of 4 after all.

Needless to say, this entire story creeps up on you and then completely hooks you in. I felt book one was an interesting story, but book 3....wow... I literally could not put it down. A late night reading became a very late night, because I just had to find out the ending. The pressure during the story kept building and building, the pace was brilliant and i got so antsy about what was coming that I found myself speeding up during the non essential paragraphs and had to stop myself glancing ahead.

The basic story premise is there are poets in the world, who can describe an idea and bind that idea into a mini god. This mini god is called an Andat and only one race of people have them. Given that the Andats can be beings 'stone made soft' means that they wield incredible power, the power holds all the power with his control over the Andat, so if you want to dig a mine for raw materials, well poet will come and make stone butter. It of course scares the shit out of the neighbours as your poet could from his bedroom turn an entire nation into quicksand and sink everyone in it.

That is as far as I am going, because everything else will spoil. I am definitely recommending this to all my fantasy buddies. By the time you get to book three you will be an absolute fan.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED SERIES!15 s Allen Walker186 1,418

Holy. Crap.

Full review: https://youtu.be/qYcEtddjZgA16 s Margret142 72

Very good and emotional. Daniel Abraham is best when he's portraying the true cost of war14 s Grace Dionne309 254

Re-reading this has cemented it as one of my favourite books of all time

This book was absolutely incredible. Video discussion will be coming at some point soon :)2021 202315 s Mark1,030 79

A lot of the time you read fantasy the book ends up being some world-traveling epic. Lots of the second half of the Wheel of Time series, for instance, seemed to be making a checklist of all of the assorted nations that the action had not been to yet, and going to those places. Lots of politics, lots of tertiary characters, sad yarns spun. It's automatically epic if a half-sketched world is threatened, right?

Some wars are fought between good and evil. Some wars are just fought because two sides, neither of whom is entirely good or evil, end up fighting. In the third volume of The Long Price Quartet, it is the latter sort of war. The distant Galts come invading, because it turns out there is a general who is very interested in the world not having andats any more, a stance which is not indefensible. Only the Khai Machi, our old friend Otah, who has spent another fourteen years or so being an eccentric part of the Khaiem, has any interest in envisioning a post-andat world, and so he becomes the nemesis, because it turns out that when you have magical beings that are largely used for commerce but can be used for aggressive purposes as well, there's not a whole lot of need to maintain a standing army.

This is cool to see play out. A strength of this series is multiple complex characters, perhaps because there have been years (in world time) between books for them to develop conflicting motivations. They get along, or don't, and what they've been through matters, and sometimes they change, sometimes they rise to the occasion. Or they don't. War is messy. Anyway, sometimes I see praise heaped upon characters for being complex when they're one-dimensional with one or two token backstory bits to differentiate them and this is about as boring as one-dimensional characters. Daniel Abraham has actual human beings for characters and it's awesome.

There are gobs of fantasy series out there that sprawl and turn into gigantic messes. I've read and d my share of them, but seriously, sometimes, goddamn. Goodreads notes that the hardcover edition of An Autumn War was 366 pages. That is a tightly-packed, fast-paced story with its share of action that is nonetheless character-driven. Choices are made that matter, without the prose wanking at us about how much those choices matter. Scenery is painted vividly but briefly. The whole "took a pose" thing mercifully blends in with the rest of the scenery.

Basically, take all the good parts of 21st century fantasy stuff and then remove all the parts that suck but you just kinda put up with them because fantasy is fun. Then you get the Long Price Quartet. And it's finished! Right now I can go read the next book, which is the last book! Amazing.fantasy13 s Chris Haught586 237

This was brilliant at times. At others, it dragged a little. But even when it was moving slowly, I enjoyed it.

I'm really starting to some of these characters. New ones, and the ones carried over from the earlier books. Abraham writes them so well that love or hate them, they're worth reading about. Or listening, in this case. The audiobook performance of Neil Shah was perfect for this book. At first I wasn't sure at all I d him, but after a couple of chapters his voice molded to the story. And his character voices are perfect.

I really need to see where this series will go from here. One more book and it's over. The way this one has built up to it, I think I'm in for a real treat.2015-dark-room-challenge 2015-series-challenge audiobook ...more13 s Rob863 572

Executive Summary: Best one yet. More action than the previous two, but again the emphasis is character driven political conflicts.

Audio book: Neil Shah continues to be a good, but not great narrator. It makes audio a viable option, but far from a must listen.

Full Review
I continue to be impressed with Mr. Abraham. Each book continues to improve on the previous one.

This one has more action than the previous ones, but again the main focus is on the politics of the Khaiem, and raises the stakes with it's conflict with Galt.

The best part of this series continues to be it's characters. In this book, my particular favorites are the new antagonist Balasar and the mercenary captain Sinjah (or however you spell it).

I bounce from despising Balasar to starting to him, or to remember how misguided and hateful he is being. And the actions of Sinjah kept me guessing the whole time. Both are very complex characters that relish in the shades of grey Mr. Abraham seems to be so good at.

I must also add I had no idea where this book was going to end up. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out at least the broad strokes of most stories. This one, not so much. I will say, I'm glad I have the time to jump right into book 4, because I just had to know what would happen next.

As this is the third book in a series, there isn't much else I can say without getting into spoiler territory for either this book or the two previous ones.

This has easily been the best of the series thus far, and if the trend continues, I'm in for an excellent ending.audio-book author-male fantasy ...more12 s Sarah Aubert538 357

My favourite of the series so far. Abraham is a masterful character writer and it's so satisfying to see small moments from the first book reverberate through the narrative. I'll save my in-depth thoughts for our upcoming discussion, but this series just gets better with each instalment. 11 s Justine1,201 325

This is an easy 5 star rating for me. Abraham weaves a tale of war and heartbreak with signature skill. Finally in book three, we see the female characters stepping to the fore, and as expected, their involvement feels necessary and natural to the evolution of the story. One of the best (and most impressive) parts of the story arc as a whole has been seeing the characters change and mature.

What I most about Abraham's characters has always been their reality - they do not act perfect archetypes, they act the flawed people they are. It makes them more interesting because you can't always rely on them to do the "right" thing, or even to know what the "right" thing is for that matter. That hasn't changed in this book. We still see the characters struggling with their humanity, their inability to control their world, their wants and desires, and the people they love and cherish.

On the writing itself, there were so many small moments that were captured in this book so perfectly. I find that is something of a rarity, and it made reading this book a particular pleasure.2015-read11 s Eh?Eh!385 4

...that feeler explodes. Um, not a spoiler to say it's a big ol' war (see book title).

This book begins maybe another 10 years later. A rival nation, maybe based on England with its pale skinned people and steam engines, and a general determined to remove andats by wiping out the poets and their libraries. With a ploy that's a little too convenient for my taste, the general blitzkriegs the Summer Cities. War is hell, the locals attempt guerilla warfare, and a finally a love triangle I dig - more because it's barely there, viewed through screens, not in-your-face. The general ends up at the northernmost city from the previous book where the last remaining poets attempt to harness an andat. Oh man, another wow! scene where the result devastates both nations and that part about half-breeds, excellent.

I remember the word bacon appeared on page 138. Sinja and his line near the end, yay!

Amazing set-up for the last book.babble-added weep10 s Lema192 96

My first favorite book of 2018 and the book that would add this quartet to the rank of my FAVORITE SERIES OF ALL TIME.

Man, let me start out by saying that EVERYONE should read this book!
But Lema, you didn't give the full 5 stars to the first two? (You can see here the for Book 1 and Book 2)
Well I was an IGNORANT FOOL BACK THEN! ok not really, it's just that this book is everything and it's totally worth it to read the first two just to get to this one (true they can be a bit slow, but they are short with excellent writing and plots and each one surpasses its predecessor by miles and miles).

Again, remember when I was complaining about the detachment I felt in book 1, well it's all all the lacking emotions has been packed tightly in this one, I swear I had misty eyes at some interaction every other page, and the climax? oooh the climax, the battle scenes was so well done, it came close to something out of the Stormlight Archives or the Faithful and the Fallen, yes THAT good, with the added bonus of this being my constant state of mind for 100 pages straight (you can ask Petrik, I was wailing the whole way through :P)



Another way that I want to describe this book is being beautiful inside out, the cover is just magical, and this one focuses a lot more than the previous ones on themes of family love, friendship, devotion and loyalties and urgh my heart just thinking about it *clutches chest*, you find yourself rooting for freaking everyone, and all sides of conflict. The characters, after following them for the past almost 30 years of their lives, have become my family and I now love every single one of them, I find their joy is mine and their sorrow is sadly mine as well.

I just can't praise this book enough, just do yourself a favor and buy the beautiful bindups of every 2 novels. Kylie, girl I owe you for this wonderful recommendation :')fantasy favorites7 s Scott385 22

I probably say this in all my of Abraham's books but I'm so impressed with his writing. There's nothing wasted in these books; each chapter, each paragraph, each word feels meticulously planned to create the desired affect. His stories truly feel alive

And not only that but his characters always feel honest and human. There are no perfect people in this world, who always do the exact right thing at the right moment. There are people who love, who hate, who make mistakes, who attempt to better themselves. Very three dimensionalfantasy7 s Robyn827 159

That did not end the way I thought it would, and I think that's a good thing. In many ways, I think this has been the most relatable book of the series - for the most part, the characters feel extremely real and the world remains utterly vibrant. I was thankful for the Galt POV this time around, but at the same time I continue to find their motivations very obscure. (To offer advice in hindsight, I thin
Autor del comentario:
=================================

“In the tradition of government-issue graves, the stones are devoid of epitaphs, parting endearments, even dates of birth. But visitors familiar with the American and British invasion of North Africa in November 1942, and the subsequent seven-month struggle to expel the Axis powers there, can make reasonable conjectures. We can surmise that Willet H. Wallace, a private first class in the 26th Infantry Regiment who died on November 9, 1942, was killed at St. Cloud, Algeria, during the three days of hard fighting against, improbably, the French. Ward H. Osmun and his brother Wilbur W., both privates from New Jersey in the 18th Infantry and both killed on Christmas Eve 1942, surely died in the brutal battle of Longstop Hill, where the initial Allied drive in Tunisia was stopped – for more than five months, as it turned out – within sight of Tunis. Ignatius Glovach, a private first class in the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, who died on Valentine’s Day, 1943, certainly was killed in the opening hours of the great German counteroffensive known as the battle of Kasserine Pass. And Jacob Feinstein, a sergeant from Maryland in the 135th Infantry who died on April 29, 1943, no doubt passed during the epic battle for Hill 609, where the American Army came of age…”
- Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942

My first introduction to the U.S. Army’s invasion of North Africa in World War II came from Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One. The film, starring Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill, opens with the Torch landings, and combines elements of tragedy and farce predicated on the uncertainty over whether or not the French would fight on Hitler’s behalf. Initially, the French played the villains; in other words, they act French. The Americans are pinned down by heavy fire. Explosions throw up gouts of sand. Men die. Just as soon as the real sharp fighting begins, however, the French throw down their arms and begin hugging the U.S. infantrymen. Jaunty music begins playing. All in all, the scene is laced with dark humor.

Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn tells the full story of the U.S. Army’s involvement in North Africa, from the landings in Morocco and Algeria to the final push into Tunisia. Fuller’s film, this Pulitzer Prize-winning account has elements of farce and tragedy. Un the movie, however, Atkinson’s tale is laced mainly with blood and hard lessons.

It is the first volume of what Atkinson calls “the Liberation Trilogy.” Subsequent entries cover the invasions of Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. Thankfully, Atkinson finished the third volume is sublime fashion, so this is a trilogy you should definitely dive into. (In other words, you won’t be every fan of George R.R. Martin or Robert Caro, waiting half a decade for the next book, wondering if there will be a next book).

As far as World War II books ago, heck as far as history books go, this is a gem. It is a triumph of narrative, characterizations, and sober analysis. Even if you’ve never read a single book about World War II (I’ve been told such people exist), you can dive right in. And even if you’ve read a hundred books about World War II, there is still much here to enjoy.

The quality of nonfiction is usually a compromise between accessibility and scholarship. The ease with which a book is read – the more you enjoy it – is usually inverse to its academic merits. And vice versa. Atkinson proves this doesn't have to be the case. He’s turned an obscure, neglected theater of World War II into a rousing saga that also has 80 pages of endnotes.

One of the things I most appreciated about Army at Dawn is that it doesn’t mess around. This isn’t one of those histories that takes around 100 pages to get the context just so. Instead, things are well under way in about 50. The story gets moving instantly, and never stops. This is a beach read for the beach reader who looks at the waves and sand and imagines an amphibious assault.

Partially, Atkinson gains this momentum because he doesn’t spend a lot of time debating the Torch landings. I’m fine with that authorial choice.

Briefly, Atkinson argues that the Torch landings were necessary in the paradigm in which they occurred. It was a doable operation, it helped ease pressure on the Russians, it set up a potential invasion of Sicily and Italy, and it blooded the American Army. There isn’t a lot of time spent on this argument because Atkinson’s entire book really supports it. The North African landings were all mitigated disasters. They succeeded, but only as bloody messes. Had the Americans thrown themselves straight at the Continent - an early D-Day, if you will - they would have been torn to shreds by the Wehrmacht. It's not just cheerleading or revisionism to say that North Africa was a vital proving ground. Had America tried to prove itself elsewhere, it might have been annihilated.

As a storyteller, Atkinson is engaging and efficient. Take, for instance, this paragraph, which neatly encapsulates the enormity of the undertaking, while never forgetting its human dimension:

Into the holds went tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and stepladders, alarm clocks and bicycles. Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins. Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellant, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags. Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally. And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and sixty rolls of flypaper for reach 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.

A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department on October 18, held a thousand Purple Hearts.

Atkinson is masterful in his descriptions of combat, utilizing both primary remembrances and vivid prose. Overconfidence, under-planning, and the perfidious French create a brisk and violent confrontation on the beaches. Later, as the Allies move slowly into the desert, their tanks come up against the superior German panzers:

Another Stuart [tank] was hit, and another. They brewed up the first. Crewmen tumbled from the hatches, their hair and uniforms brilliant with flame, and they rolled across the dirt and tore away their jackets in burning shreds. Others were trapped in their tanks with fractured limbs, and their cries could be heard above the booming tumult as they burned to death in fire so intense it softened the armor plates…

An Army at Dawn introduces dozens of memorable individuals, from the famous, such as George Patton and Bernard Montgomery, to lesser known but equally deserving men such as Terry De La Mesa Allen, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., and Patton’s son-in-law, John Waters. In telling his story, Atkinson moves easily from the top down and from the bottom up. At the very end of this food chain, looming over everyone, is Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It would be going way too far to suggest that Atkinson is critical of Eisenhower. In the realm of World War II, he’s something of a sacred cow, where even his flaws are deemed virtues in the larger scheme. But in this volume, Eisenhower is just one step removed from failure. Atkinson paints him as a man stretched right to the breaking point, chugging enough coffee and smoking enough cigarettes to give the reader lung cancer. One early British complaint about Ike was his penchant to play politics; of course, it would later be his political abilities that made him such an asset to the Allies.

A few years ago, the Greatest Generation was in high fashion. Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose, and their many dollar-sign-eyed imitators scooped up just about every “We Saved the World” story they could find and put it between hard covers. The glut of books that came out in this time created a distorted view of what World War II was, what it was , and what it meant.

In many ways, Atkinson can’t quite contain his hero worship. He speaks of the American Army – here in its infancy – with the pride of a father speaking of his child.

But he is also clear-eyed enough to call a mistake a mistake, and to separate the George Patton’s from the Lloyd Fredenhall’s. He takes time to explain all the foul-ups, but he never excuses them. And though his sentences occasionally soar too high, he always brings you back down to the few inches of sand and fear and whining bullets where the war actually took place.

An Army at Dawn is the slightest of the three entries in the Liberation Trilogy. Yet it tells you something about the magnitude of Atkinson’s achievement that that it is also a masterpiece.world-war-ii141 s Michael FinocchiaroAuthor 3 books5,795

Long-winded, but incredibly well-written and exhaustive, An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson was definitely a choice pick for the Pulitzer for History 2003. The book is simply brilliant is demonstrating that friction between British and America commands nearly imploded the effort in Africa and how close the battle for Tunisia really was. The psychological portraits of the legendary characters of Ike, Patton, Montgomery and Rommel were fascinating. The detailed battle maps were also incredibly useful. As a natural pacifist, I felt that Atkinson was writing from a cynical American perspective: we were very, very far from perfect and committed our share of atrocities but believed we were in a holy war against the Axis and that German brutality at Stalingrad - which made even German officers pale and disheartened - reinforced this belief. I think his thesis that the Africa campaign was a necessary warmup for the Italian campaign (subject of the second book of his trilogy) and Normandy (subject of the 3rd book) is probably accurate. While I still detest war and am bereaved at the thought of so much senseless death, it was clear that Hitler had to be stopped and was clearly engaged in a suicidally insane war on two fronts and that he would never yield until all hope was annihilated.
Atkinson 's book is a critical read for those wanting to understand this little known campaign and see that the Hollywood version of our GIs is simply lies and damned lies. Yes, they were heroic at some points, but they were also frail humans and despite the glory history subsequently heaped on their shoulders, many decisions of the upper chain of command had catastrophic results on the field. If I had to sum it up in a phrase, it is kind of the equivalent of Howard Zinn's extraordinarily eye-opening People's History of the US but instead focused on the African campaign of the Allied forces striking west to east from 1942-1943.history non-fiction pulitzer-history ...more93 s Lizzy305 165

"For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead." Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 was my introduction to WWII African campaign. I found it masterful, thoroughly researched, and bestowed with a well-crafted and colorful narrative. It brings the war, with its scalding heat and contrasting cold nights of the desert turned bitter with icy winds; and gifts the readers with tales about the protagonists, depositing them right on the battlefields. Thus, it enables us to hear the sounds of fighting and dying with the cries of the wounded. It allows us to witness the lives of individual survivors, of the dying, as the dead are brought forth with the power of Homer's Iliad. Indeed, [t]his is an ancient place, built on the ruins of Roman Cartage and a stone’s throw from the even older Punic city. It is incomparably serene. Serene, but not for long.

We are introduced to General Eisenhower, Rear Admiral Hewitt, General Patton, General Fredendall, General Bradley, among innumerable others (see below), as the Allies begin to plan and mount attacks in Morocco, Algeria but mainly in Tunisia. Throughout, the commanders competed with and criticized each other, led many times by politics and not common sense or military strategy, generating unimaginable tragedies and casualties that could probably have been avoided.

The Americans were unprepared…

The main impression I came away with was just how poorly prepared the U.S. military was for the war they faced. In many ways, North Africa was a training ground for bigger battles to come in Italy and Normandy, and it's a very good thing the Allied troops started in Africa, rather than launching straight into an invasion of France, as many American commanders were advocating. As for combat, TORCH revealed profound shortcomings in leadership, tactics, equipment, martial élan, and even common sense.

From the start problems and errors started to accumulate. To begin with, the landing on the beaches was extremely problematic, not a single transport could be found in the right location, and some were six miles out of position. “To be perfect honest,” one naval officer confessed, “I am not right sure exactly where we are.”

Once the landing was accomplished, however, things did not improve. Again lost, the troops had to go on. Major Robert Moore, former Boy captain from Villisca, hours after landing found himself and his inexperienced regiment in Lambiridi, just west of Algiers. He heard gunfire and a machine gun overlooking the road killed two soldiers and wounded two more. Things got worse, he now commanded fragments of all three of the regiment’s battalions. Another machine gun killed more soldiers wounding a captain. Moore rose for a look, suddenly he was on his back, stunned and confused. Moore unsnapped his own chin strap and removed his helmet. …a snapper’s bullet ran across the crest a black scar.

That was a lesson not to be forgotten,
For the first time, Moore realized how frightened he was. Even nameless skirmishes could be lethal. “I thought the fight with the snipers was quite a battle,” he would say months later, after receiving the Silver Star for his valor at Lambiridi. “Now I it was just a comic-opera war.” Still, good men lay as dead as if at Antietam or the Meuse-Argonne."

In these first hours of the war, Moore had learned several vital lessons that thousands of other American soldiers were also learning around the rim of Africa. Some lessons were fundamental: stay low; take a few extra moments to study the map before setting off. But the others involved the nature of combat and leadership: a realization that battlefields were inherently chaotic; that improvisation was a necessary virtue; that speed and stealth and firepower won small skirmishes as well as big battles; that every moment held risk and every man was mortal.
In the beginning they were fighting the Vichy French, which they erroneously expect not to fight at all. American troops believed French defenders would be so cowed that they would greet the invaders with ‘brass bands’. However, Franco-American amity was rapidly reestablished. Algiers was fairly easy to conquer; later the capture of Oran required more fighting but gave the Allies virtual possession of Algeria.
But even the cautious commander felt a little cocky: the White House was told to expect the occupation of Tunis and Bizerte in December and the fall of Tripoli in late January.
Nevertheless, the big problem with the American troops was they couldn't fight. They seemed unprepared for what they were facing. For one, they believed they were being forced into a war that was not theirs; and, once bullets started flying many were too frightened to fire their weapons. Thus, running to the rear screaming seemed natural to expect. That did not help morale. The result was vastly favorable to the Germans, affording them in the beginning easy victories.
Light snow fell on the Americans and British soldiers picking their way through Kasserine Pass on the morning of February 25. The desolate landscape was "cluttered with wrecked German and American airplanes, burned out vehicles, abandoned tanks, [and] scattered shell cases," Robinett reported. Ratio tins, unfinished love letters, a pair of boxing gloves: the detritus of battle lost and won.

“The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history.” Harry Butcher scribbled in his diary, "There is a definite hangheadedness.

On learning how to win a war...

The men had seen things they could never imagine before: men incinerated; other eviscerated; and soldiers killed by booby traps. The list is endless. As a result,
They were becoming hard-bitten. They were wary of excessively gungho leaders – known as ‘questers for glory’ – but appreciative of those who remained calm and tactically alert. They had learned that combat was slower than expected, a choreography of feint, thrust, withdrawal, and parry; that the battlefield often seemed empty and lonely; that death was ubiquitous, a fifth element to air, fire, water and earth. True, they did not hate yet; but they were developing the capacity for hatred, which required a nihilistic core of resignation and rage.
Undoubtedly, the American troops had finally attained the right demeanor for war:
"Ernie Pyle now noticed in the troops "the casual and workshop manner in which they talked about killing. They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking human life was sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft." The American combat soldier had finally learned to hate.

Amazingly, barely two months would elapse between the “hangheadedness” of Kasserine and the triumph of total victory in Tunisia."
Fedendall was relieved and Patton would command the II Corps, but for a short time before resuming his preparations for Sicily. Omar Bradley, Patton’s deputy, would take charge after him. As command was transferred the American forces were learning how to fight. Their ultimate success came in 1943 when the Germans were defeated, now the Americans had a core of soldiers, over 100,000 men, who knew how to kill and would put that to use in Italy and France. Plus Eisenhower had learned his first lessons on how to run a war.

Some conclusions...

Atkinson presents a remarkable detailed picture of the African campaign, with an unrelenting focus on the very human men who managed, or were learning to manage, the war. There is everything you would expect to read about when considering men: egos, intelligence, fears, desires, competition. All together his prose helps to make this a very compelling story.

Through exhaustive research, personalizes the story at every turn; the author’s prose is full of fascinating anecdotes worth quoting here, but one in particular gives a taste of the ambience:
To deal with the inevitable traffic fatalities a sliding scale of reparations was established, paid the oversize French currency GIs called wallpaper: 25,000 francs ($500) for a dead camel; 15,000 for a dead boy; 10,000 for a dead donkey; 500 for a dead girl.
On the whole, the Germans were simply better at fighting a war. Well, they had been at war for over two years. ”Had the landings been opposed by Germans,” Patton later conceded, “we would never have gotten ashore.” It’s a frightening prospect to imagine an Axis that had access to the materiel wealth that the Allies eventually enjoyed.Even near misses from the German guns were devastating… Compared to the German tank guns, the Stuart 37mm ‘snapped a cap pistol,’ a platoon leader observed.

Ultimately, the overwhelming materiel superiority of the Allies was defining. It seems they could afford to make mistakes. Several, in fact. Atkinson concludes:
“The battle,” Rommel famously observed, “is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.” The shooting had begun months before in northwest Africa, but now the quartermasters truly came into their own. The prodigies of American industrial muscle and organizational acumen began to tell.
From February to March 1943, 130 ships sailed to Africa with 84,000 troops, 24,000 vehicles and a million tons of cargo. The Germans were fortunate to slip a handful of ships across the straits from Sicily against Allied bombing.

Arrogance, error, inexperience, and 70,000 allied casualties served to strengthen the Americans: Generals sacrificed troops as they learn how to command; mid-level officers did or died; support troops built desert cities; and the troops learn to hate or be killed. Yes, it is in fact an army at dawn, with a Supreme Commander that balances politics and war and often comes up short. Atkinson’s review of the terrible aftermath of Sid bou Zid is specially revealing:
In truth, Eisenhower – preoccupied with strategic and political issues, and having no personal combat experience – had simply failed to grasp the tactical peril on that Valentine’s Day morning. In trying to serve as both supreme commander and field general, he had mastered neither job. The fault was his, and it would enlarge him for bigger battles on future fields. But it was not his fault alone. Mistakes clattered down the line, along with bad luck, bad timing, and the other handmaidens of havoc.
So, Eisenhower learned to command and the troops learned not only to hate but kill more effectively.

So, what else do we learn with Atkinson’s narrative? Mainly that nothing, absolutely nothing goes according to plan. It’s surprising how little information planners had on hand, who yet confidently drew up ambitious battle plans. What’s even more surprising is how often the Army managed to pull them off, regardless. And, ultimately, the important thing is not how you play the game, it is whether you win or lose.
For months, Eisenhower had worried that Axis troops would convert the Cap Bon peninsula into a diehard redoubt. But once Bizert and Tunis fell, fuel shortages and Allied alacrity prevented Arnim from regrouping. Bradley's soldiers cut the last Bizerte-Tunis road at daylight May 9, effectively ending American combat in Tunisia. Now there was nothing but smoke out renegades and escort prisoners to their cages.

For the British farther south, the end was less tidy, although the Axis troops still holding the Enfidaville line lacked enough gasoline to fall back forthy miles on Cap Bon unless they abandoned their heavy weapons.
Atkinson closes here confirming that the now Americans certainly were an Army and Eisenhower a mature commander.
No soldier in Africa had changed more – grown more than Eisenhower. He continued to pose as a small-town Kansan, insisting that he was “too simple-minded to be an intriguer or [to] attempt to be clever,” and he retained the winning traits of authenticity, vigor, and integrity. He had displayed admirable grace and character under crushing strain. But he was hardly artless. Naiveté provided a convenient screen for a man who was complex, shrewd and sometimes Machiavellian. …The failings of Fredendall and other deficient commanders had taught him to be tougher, even ruthless, with subordinates. And he had learned the hardest lesson of all: that for an army to win a war, young men had to die.
A great end for a book that is agonizing, alluring, ingenious, and gripping. Highly recommended.

----
Note: quotes in italics.

The Commanders

General Eisenhower
Thirty months earlier, Eisenhower had been a lieutenant colonel who had never commanded even a platoon in combat.

Once Eisenhower had settled in Algiers with his staff, however, the majority of his time was not on the front. …In truth, he spent at least three-quarters of his time worrying about political issues, and the preoccupation poorly served the Allied causes.

Eisenhower had yet to bend events to his iron will, to impose as well as implore, to become a commander in action as well as in rank.

Rear Admiral Hewitt
“You do everything you can,” he d to say, “then you hope for the best.”

Commanding Task Force 34, a convoy of more than 100 ships in nine columns, it approached the Moroccan coast on November 7, minutes ahead of schedule. However, the weather might not help. The forecast of landing conditions were ‘very poor’.

The lives of 34,000 men rested heavily on his musings; history had often punished invaders who disregarded the weather. But a decision was required. From London, the commander of amphibious forces, Lord Mountbatten, had the same grim forecasts. ’I hope to God,’ Mountbatten said, ‘Admiral Hewitt will have the guts to go through with it.’ This crucial choice was Hewitt’s, not Eisenhower’s nor Patton’s who was to assume command once landed. Thankfully, Hewitt announced his decision to execute Plan One as scheduled, without betraying the turmoil churning within him.

General Patton
“He was a paradox and would remain one, a great tangle of calculated mannerisms and raw, uncalculated emotion. Well-read, fluent in French, and the wealthy child of privilege, he could be crude, rude, and plain foolish. He had reduced his extensive study of history and military art to a five-word manifesto of war: “violent attacks everywhere with everything.”

Once he reached Fedala, he lost no time in displaying his most conspicuous command attributes: energy, will, a capacity to see the enemy’s perspective, and bloodlust.

Yet Patton’s defects also were revealed: a wanton disregard for logistics; a childish propensity to feud with other services; an incapacity to empathize with frightened young soldiers; a willingness to disregard the spirit if not the letter of orders from his superiors; and an archaic tendency to assess his own generalship on the basis of personal courage under fire.

General Bradley
On Thursday morning, April 22, Patton’s successor arrived by jeep on the crest of a leafy hill outside Béja. He was a bespectacled six-footer, with a high, convex forehead and thin hair that had been greying since his cadet years. Now he was fifty, just. Omar Nelson Bradley had moved to center stage; there he would remain for the duration and beyond. Patton, Bradley could be simple, direct, ruthless, but the similarities ended there. …he also possessed an intolerant rectitude and a capacity for dissimulation that in lesser men might devolve into deceit.

He had a born infantryman’s feel for terrain, with a detailed mental map of every significant swale and ridge from Bédja to Bizerte.

General Fredendall
But who would command II Corps? Eisenhower had just the man, and in him the making of a disaster.

Unencumbered with charisma, Fredentall substituted bristling obstinacy. Truscott found him ‘outspoken in his opinions of superiors and subordinates a.’

Fredendall chose as avenue for the operation was on the eastern border of Algeria in ancient Tébessa. …Soon Fredendall and his staff officers had established residence in Speedy Valley but also known as ‘Lloyd’s Very Last Resort’ and ‘Shangri-La, a million miles from nowhere.’ Speedy Valley was seventy miles from the front.

Brigadier General Robinett
Yet for his bumptious gall, Robinett possessed an unsparing analytical mind. He recognized that he himself was culpable of the rout, having failed to organize a night counterattack that might have saved more Surreys, Hampshires, and Americans. He had ‘not foreseen the possibility and had no plan for such a contingency,’ he later admitted. ‘Frankly, I was too new at the game.’

Major General Ward
Commander of ‘Old Ironsides’ – the 1st Armored Division – had waited first in Britain and then in Oran for permission to unify his force at last. Ward was a quiet, genteel man, with large sensitive eyes set in an oval face; some thought he resembled a schoolmaster more than a tank commander. …The other peculiar trait was an instant willingness to take offense from General Fredendall, his superior officer. He soon concluded that Fredendall and the II Corps staff were not even studying the map carefully before drafting deployment orders ‘on absurd lines.’

In the American Army few relieved commanders got a second chance to lead men in combat; Ward was an exception because he was exceptional. But first he had to do penance for his virtues as well as his sins.

General Alexander
Under a proposal from General Brook, the combined chiefs agreed that a single general would command both Anderson’s First Army and Montgomery’s soon-to-arrive Eight Army in Tunisia. That commander would be Eisenhower; but three British deputies would handle daily sea, air and ground. The ground commander due to assume command in February, would be Alexander.

General Montgomery
Hardened in the trenches – he had been wounded at Ypres – he was hardened more by the early death of a wife he adored. After taking command in Egypt in mid-August 1942 under Alexander’s indulgent supervision, Montgomery had whipped Rommel first at Alam Halfa, then a second, decisive time at El Alamein.

And yet. Sparks flew up around Montgomery. He was puerile, petty, and egocentric, bereft of irony, humility, and a sense of proportion. It would not suffice for him to succeed; others must fail. Swaggering into Tunisia, Montgomery and his army were also thoroughly overconfident. He envisioned a grand sweep to Tunis, with more laurels and church bells awaiting him.

Field Marshall Rommel
most of history’s conspicuously successful commanders, Rommel had an uncanny ability to dominate the mind of his adversaries. …with neither Prussian blood nor the crimson trouser stripe of General Staff alumnus, he embodied several traits of his native region: self-reliance, thrift, decency, and a dour common sense.

Rommel’s first successes in Africa manifested the audacity, tactical brilliance, and the personal style – he occasional hunted gazelle with a submachine gun from star car – that contrasted so invidiously with British lumpishness and won him the sobriquet of Desert Fox.africa history military ...more75 s Jill Hutchinson1,511 103

I read this book ten years ago and decided to revisit it due to its excellence. This is the first of the Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy of books by Rick Atkinson about WWII and it is a real winner. This edition concentrates on the war in North Africa and the Allies' confrontations with Rommel and von Armin and the Afrika Corps.

The initial landing on the continent of Africa, Operation Torch, was pretty much a fiasco and the Americans were green and inexperienced. Men were not prepared for the horrors of warfare and the British who had been in Africa for a while were totally disgusted with the American troops. The choice of Eisenhower as Commander-in-Chief was not well received and when Patton arrived even the troops under his command were at a loss to understand his tactical moves and his insistence on being on the front lines. The political situation among the Allies often was at the breaking point with the goal being who got the glory rather than fighting the enemy as a combined force, utilizing the strengths of both the British and the Americans.

It's an insiders look at the behind the scenes machinations of battle with fascinating detail Boys became men and the commanding officers either exhibited their talents or their inability to lead. Africa was the training ground, especially for Americans for the battle to come on the continent of Europe. I highly recommend this book for the WWII history buff.military-history world-history wwi-wwii58 s Ali23 11

The Liberation Trilogy is what happens when an English literature MA graduate with experience in frontline reporting (of the Gulf War type), decides to write military history. Hence there is something for everybody in these books (I’m currently midway through The Day of Battle): for military buffs, there are tactical discussions of the finest quality coupled with great maps; for lovers of ancient Greek mythology, comparable heroic feats from Iliad and Aeneid are included; for those with a penchant for literature, there are enchanting paragraphs that are breath-taking and majestic (I needed to use OED a lot though); and for those who love a detailed storytelling of war with biographical sketches and authorial sense of humor, Atkinson is here to gratify.

Atkinson has done extensive (repeat extensive; I’m mimicking Ike) research and has visited the battlefields to enhance his narrative:


A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.
Yet even when the choreography of armies is understood, or the movement of this battalion or that rifle squad, we crave intimate detail, of individual men in individual foxholes.
...The dead resist such intimacy. The closer we try to approach, the farther they draw back, rainbows or mirages. They have outsoared the shadow of our night, to reside in the wild uplands of the past. History can take us there, almost. Their diaries and letters, their official reports and unofficial chronicles—including documents that, until now, have been hidden from view since the war—reveal many moments of exquisite clarity over a distance of sixty years. Memory, too, has transcendent power, even as we swiftly move toward the day when not a single participant remains alive to tell his tale, and the epic of World War II forever slips into national mythology. The author’s task is to authenticate: to warrant that history and memory give integrity to the story, to aver that all this really happened.
But the final few steps must be the reader’s. For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead.


It is a testimony to the vastness and the globality of World War II that the North African Campaign, which lasted from November 1942 to May 1943 for the Americans and was a bit of a sideshow compared to other fronts, was so involved and complex. The biggest large-scale amphibious operation in the history of warfare yet still minor in comparison to the limitless carnage of the war.

Rick Atkinson captures the complexity of this campaign in the best possible way. Nothing is neglected. The challenges faced by military and civilian leaderships of the Allies are intimately portrayed and analyzed; the inexperience of the US Army is exposed and explained. The agonies and triumphs of the soldiers are also to be found aplenty. I can say this is the finest type of military history that I’ve read.

North Africa was a campaign full of errors and shortcomings at every level of command. Tactical miscalculation was the order of the day in many a fight. Sound coordination between different branches of the Armed Forces was hard to achieve and failure to do so, produced needless and avoidable disasters.

After Americans united with the British Eighth Army to expel the Axis forces from Tunisia, interallied harmony was seriously strained. This brotherly collision continued to be a major theme until the Liberation of Berlin. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, was responsible for keeping that harmony intact and generally he succeeded, despite his initial wobbly leadership.

All the battles are described with patience and the depictions are rich in detail. One bloody engagement after another, GIs and Tommies pushed the Germans (and Italians) back until the enemy was confined to a limited zone in Tunisia. With all their failures and frustrations, the Allied Forces managed to throw the German forces out of Africa, this time for good. The next stop was Sicily and — possibly though not certainly ??? mainland Italy.

The title An Army At Dawn captures the essence of the story: this was after all the first campaign of the Liberation of Europe and the defeat of Nazi Germany during which “The American Army came of age”.favorites wwii50 s18 comments Anthony241 66

The First Gamble.

Volume one of Rick Atkinson’s ‘Liberation Trilogy’, An Army at Dawn accounts the Second World War in northern Africa, where raw American troops encountered the dangerous and professional Wehrmacht for the first time. Atkinson tells the story of how and why the allies came to fight in Africa and the slow and violent victory to free that theatre from fighting.

One of the key points of this book is that the American leadership I’m under General Dwight D Eisenhower did not understand the German war machine and it took them along time to learn to fight. This is a refreshing narrative far removed from the Hollywood built myth of American GIs automatically being the best soldiers in the world. After easily overwhelming an apathetic Vichy French force they were completed unprepared for the Germans who fought and thought differently. The Germans were war hardened, had panzer tanks and an inspirational leader in Erwin Rommel. This was a slow lesson to learn, with disasters such as Kasserine Pass teaching then the hard way. However, as Atkinson writes, this built Eisenhower and commanders such as Generals George S Patton and Omar Bradley. Crucially the Americans learn to fight, became a first class force and was ready to take on ‘Fortress Europe’ itself in order to win the war. This couldn’t have been done with North Africa.

Atkinson writes this book with his journalistic flare (he cut his teeth as a war journalist) and is careful to include the view of the ordinary soldier and the internal clashes of the allies, almost as significant as the combat with the Germans. This comes from the criticisms of the British against the standards of soldiers the Americans first brought across, to Patton’s demanding of the sacking of Orlando Ward. Ward hadn’t done much wrong but Eisenhower obliged. The battle for Tunisia is much of the focus of the book and possibly the entire campaign. What I feel is true is that the allies needed this campaign to learn to fight the Axis Powers on continental Europe. An invasion into France before 1944 would have ended in disaster. Of course, the Mediterranean theatre got downgraded to third place after Germany first, then Japan second after the Casablanca Conference.

Overall this is a good book, with detail of the destruction and death in the fighting. The heavy casualties the allies endured is on par with Normandy at time. Atkinson also explores the tensions and pressures of command and working with an ally, as I mentioned above, alongside the major issue of logistics. This is all intermingled with the personal experiences of those caught up in the fighting. What is significant about this campaign however is that Eisenhower rose to prominence and the US became the senior partner. Implications which would in turn massively influence the direct of both the war and peace. However, I still feel I don’t know enough about this campaign and will look to read other books on the subject to fill my gaps. wwii32 s2 comments Joy D2,259 258

“Memory, too, has transcendent power, even as we swiftly move toward the day when not a single participant remains alive to tell his tale, and the epic of World War II forever slips into national mythology. The author’s task is to authenticate: to warrant that history and memory give integrity to the story, to aver that all this really happened. But the final few steps must be the reader’s. For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead.”

The first book in the Liberation trilogy provides a riveting account of the Allied landings in North Africa during World War II. Allied troops landed in Algeria and Morocco, overpowered the Vichy French, and fought the Axis forces on the way to Tunisia, the planned launching point for the invasion of Italy. It is a detailed description of tactics, strategy, and impact of military operations. It includes profiles of many commanders, including Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower, Alexander, Bradley, Montgomery, Patton, Rommel, and von Arnim.

This is an exceptional work of non-fiction. Atkinson’s writing is outstanding. As I read this book, the descriptions were so vivid that I felt as if a movie were running through my head.

“Not until dusk did the British vanguard reach the col below Longstop’s northwest face. Rain had transformed the Medjerda valley into a vast brown sea too quaggy even for mules. A brace of bullocks was harnessed to pull a few guns forward. Wheeled vehicles bogged down 5,000 yards from the hill. Even tracked carriers could get no closer than Chassart Teffaha, a farm hamlet two miles away. There, in a damp cellar that stank a slaughterhouse, surgeons worked by candlelight over boys beyond surgeoning; stretcher bearers dumped another load and headed back into the night without even bothering to fold stretchers stiff with blood.”

The author inserts plentiful quotes from journals, correspondences, and official documents to support his conclusions. I appreciated the inclusion of the many maps, photos, and endnotes. We get a “behind the scenes” view of the interpersonal conflicts and military politics among commanders, but it is not just a view from the top. It is also sprinkled with stories of individual soldiers. Atkinson highlights both mistakes and triumphs. “Confusion and error, valor and misdeed marked this first night of green troops in combat.”

North Africa provided a training ground for the previously untested American troops. By the time they reached Tunis, the troops were battle-hardened and ready for the fierce battles to come. It is important to understand the North African campaign in order to get a full picture of the road to the ultimate victory in Europe. I plan to read the final two books in the trilogy. This is history at its finest. I highly recommend it.
2021-top-50 africa favorites ...more26 s Elizabeth Theiss Smith314 82

If I didn't know the end of this story, I would swear the Allies are about to lose World War II. Eisenhower stays in Gibraltar for the early months, taking care of politics instead of coordinating the war effort in North Africa. Later he moves to Algiers, far from the battle front. Americans and British make every amateur mistake in the book: failure to do reconnaissance prior to engagement, dividing rather than concentrating forces, incomprehensible broken communications systems, sticking to plans conceived in ignorance rather than updating with new information. The German army by contrast runs a well-oiled machine. Rommel stays in close communication with officers who lead well-disciplined troops. He is a brilliant strategist.

American troops were inexperienced on the battlefield and American leadership was sadly deficient. Tension among the British and American officers ran high and the troops harbored stereotypes that made it hard to communicate well. The British infuriated Americans by charging them with timidity on the battlefield, suggesting that units be evacuated to the rear and retrained "under British guidance."

Worst of all were intelligence failures that disastrously influenced military strategy.

So how ever do the Allies win? Overwhelming air superiority was critical, as it allowed the Allies to destroy critical Axis infrastructure and supply chains. Ultra allowed Allies to decode Axis communications, giving them advance notice of troop, materiel, and supply movements. Battalions were reduced to skeletons by attrition from battles and defections, especially from Italian units.

In the end, it was a war of attrition. Germans had brilliant strategists in Rommel and Kesselring but lacked replacement troops, infrastructure, and materiel. Winning is impossible without an army and Hitler could little afford to send more troops to Africa.

I read this on a Kindle and strongly advise obtaining a copy of the physical book instead. Maps were very hard to decipher and I would have greatly appreciated knowing more about the terrain.
history26 s Rick RiordanAuthor 245 books424k

Atkinson's An Army at Dawn covers the 1942-1943 war in North Africa, from the initial Allied invasions to the drawn-out siege of Tunisia. all great history books, this one reads a cracking good novel. Atkinson brings his characters to life, from Supreme Commander Ike Eisenhower to the soldiers on the front line, using personal diaries, letters home, and declassified official accounts. He evokes the North African terrain in vivid detail and really makes the reader feel as if he or she is on the ground with the troops. His vignettes are by turns touching, terrifying, and absurdly funny -- such as the time Winston Churchill is found wandering along the North African beach, serenading random soldiers, until challenged by an American sentry who calls up headquarters: "Hey, there's a drunk guy down here singing to us. He says he's the prime minister of Britain." The main impression I came away with was just how poorly prepared the U.S. military was for the war they faced. In many ways, North Africa was a training ground for bigger battles to come in Italy and Normandy, and it's a very good thing the Allied troops started in Africa, rather than launching straight into an invasion of France, as many American commanders were advocating. This is a long, detailed book covering lots of ground (both literally and figuratively) but it's first-rate writing about an important campaign that forged the Allies into an effective fighting force.21 s Boudewijn730 131

Combining storytelling with historical facts, this book really stands out and truly is worth its Pullitzer in every sense

An Army at Dawn is the first book in a trilogy, where Rick Atkinson covers the liberation of Europe during World War II. This book covers the Allied landings in North Africa, starting in 1942 until the Allied victory on the Axis forces in Tunisia, ending in 1943.

The book starts with the early planning stages of the Allied invasion (Operation Torch). The big question that puzzled the Allies was on how the French would react. Intelligence gave the image that the French would offer only token resistance. The reality was different: more than token resistance, but dogged resistance resulting in some disastrous battles. Once the French were overcome, the next step was to create a cooperation between the English and Americans, while the Germans moved on them to prevent them from reaching Tunis. The Americans, naively convinced they would give the Germans a route, were waken up by the defeat at Kasserine, where the American army got a bloody nose. But after the first defeat, the Americans grew though and laid the groundwork for their victories in the coming years.

It is not only a story of soldiers, but also commanders. Atkinson shows us how Eisenhower, starting as a rather timid guy intending to keep everybody as a friend, in the end grows as well. He sacks the incompetent Fredendall, who gets a scathing review by Atkinson, and many other American commanders until Patton saves the day.

The book is an incredible combination between storytelling and historical facts, which makes it stand out from all other books. Atkinson’s reliance on battle memoirs and letters from soldiers give it a personal touch. At the same time, he paints the greater setting: the conference at Casablanca and the preparations for the invasion of Sicily.

All in all, an outstanding book which explained to me in great detail a lesser known period in the war and truly deserving its Pullitzer Price.africa dutch local-library ...more20 s Stefania Dzhanamova532 418

The first volume of the Liberation Trilogy covers the crucial first years of America's involvement in the Second World War. Rick Atkinson has written a compelling narrative of the actions in North Africa from the initial planning to the final victory in May 1943.
The book depicts the U.S Army's introduction to modern warfare. Atkinson leaves no doubt that the effort spent on North Africa was highly important because it enabled the inexperienced, bumbling army to transform into an effective fighting machine.
The Tunisian campaign, he shows, was undertaken by an American army lacking in training alongside a British one whose prevalent experience had been of defeat. Neither Eisenhower nor the GIs realized how much fury it would take to defeat General Rommel's Afrika Corps. The relative ease with which American soldiers pushed aside Vichy French forces led US generals to expect only a token resistance from the Germans. They couldn't have been further from the truth.
Untested American forces soon found themselves brutally manhandled by a much more experienced enemy and disparaged as inferior soldiers by their British allies. Clashes between and within the Allies seemed at times to overshadow even the battles with the enemy. (Atkinson's most telling example of that is the relationship between Second Corps commander George Patton and his subordinate Orlando Ward. The latter was a decent commander, who however, lacked the ruthlessness that takes a division forward in the face of heavy casualties and obstacles. With Eisenhower's approval, Patton fired him, and the result – as Goebbels called it – was a "second Stalingrad".)

The author describes Eisenhower's gradual awakening to the need to protect American morale from British ridicule as crucial to finding balance between command and international politics. Atkinson also examines how early battle failures, such as Kasserine Pass, strengthened American soldiers and their leadership. Commanders Patton and Omar Bradley rose to refute British criticism, while GIs learned that defeating the veteran Axis forces would take much more sacrifice and personal discipline than they had imagined. By the end of the North African campaign, Atkinson convincingly argues, the American army was ready to lead Allied forces onto the European continent to end the Nazi threat.

The main strength of the book are the engrossing battle-by-battle accounts, which will appeal to any WWII buff. The majority of us know about World War II, but beyond the most familiar aspects – the invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust – how much deeper does our knowledge go? As Atkinson clearly shows, the world once watched North Africa, and battles Kesserine Pass, Mareth, and El Guettar made headlines. In my opinion, they are as interesting and worth studying as the most famous aspects of the war.

Complementing the battlefield feats, Atkinson draws upon myriad letters, memoirs, diaries, and official and unofficial records that unpack very interesting facts. For example, he discovers Churchill, in Casablanca to meet Roosevelt, lounging about in a pink gown and sipping breakfast from bottle of wine. We find out that Patton practiced his signature scowl in a mirror, while Montgomery kept a photo of his archnemesis Rommel hanging above the desk throughout the whole campaign. And after Hitler angrily rejected one of his suggestions, Rommel confided to his son about the Führer: Sometimes you feel that he is not quite normal.

Rick Atkinson's Army at Dawn is an outstanding blend of engaging storytelling and historical fact. At every page, the narrative is textured with the words of men who were there, providing additional insight. Along with using their words directly, Atkinson combines these collective observations in his own way to create a vivid picture of the goings on. The book goes far beyond the "when" and "where" of the battles. It allows us a look into the lives and deaths of the soldiers. Army at Dawn is a brilliantly written narrative, which is not only informative, but also conveys the unfathomable emotions of war.wwii18 s Mike1,161 156

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 gets 5 Big Stars for reaching that rare pinnacle—a war history that can be read enjoyably by novices and historical experts. Rick Atkinson stands equal with Max Hastings and Cornelius Ryan in making this subject come alive. He uses the same techniques, walking you through how the leaders developed grand strategy and then taking you right down into the foxholes, ships and armored vehicles in the heat of battle. He uses vignettes of various parts of the battles to tell the overall story, following various participants through the campaigns. Some survive, some don’t. My copy has a forest of little scraps of paper marking key passages. I would sit down to read and suddenly would be 50 pages down the road without even noticing the passage of time. Amazing writing from start to finish.

Here are some samples:

The French surrender Algiers and the combined American/British task force flagship comes to dock in the harbor:

At dawn on Monday, the task force flagship, H.M.S. Bulolo, steamed with imperial dignity toward the Railway Jetty, unaware that an earlier near-miss from a Luftwaffe bomb had damaged her engine room telegraphs. A routine docking order from the bridge for full steam astern went unheard. The French welcoming committee on the jetty watched with mounting alarm as the ship loomed nearer at twelve knots. Officers on the bridge debated whether Bulolo’s masts would more ly shear forward or backward upon impact. Shrieking bystanders scattered; the captain yelled “Everyone lie down!” to his crew; and the great bow heaved up onto a fortuitous mudbank, demolishing the seawall and nicking a waterfront house before settling back into the harbor, intact. Applauding spectators recovered their wits and agreed that the Royal Navy knew how to make an entrance.

Throughout the book, Atkinson conveys a sense of the campaign in just a few words:

Five hundred and sixty road miles separated Algiers from Tunis, and the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles .

In individual battle scenes, Mr. Atkinson brings a vision to your mind of what the fighters experienced. Here he relates the results of an ill-planned attack on prepared defense:

Then the trap was sprung. German antitank gunners opened from three sides. “The velocity of the enemy shells was so great that the suction created by the passing projectiles pulled the dirt, sand, and dust from the desert floor and formed a wall that traced the course of each shell,” Lieutenant Laurence Robertson later recalled. Shells zipped through the American formation, trailed by thick coils of dust tinted bright green by the tracer magnesium burning on the German rounds. Within ten minutes, more than half the American tanks were ablaze; flames licked from the hatches and exhaust vents, and each wounded Sherman frothed with its thirty pounds of chemical fire retardant. Back the surviving tanks raced, as fast as reverse gear could carry….

Notable and poor performance from the lowest soldier to the highest level is highlighted and how it impacted the course of battle is discussed. The good and the bad laid out for all to read and consider…I that approach. None are spared the microscope. Here is a wonderful paragraph, describing the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Casablanca. In just a few sentences, we get a glimpse at Churchill’s appreciation for the grapevine; French colonial rulers complaining about the demands of the ruled; and Roosevelt’s casual anti-Semitism:

A state dinner for the sultan of Morocco and his grand vizier went well, though Churchill grumbled because, in deference to Muslim sensibilities, no alcohol was served. The prime minister insisted on a postprandial open bar so he could recover from the pernicious effects of teetotalism. At noon on January 17, Roosevelt received General Nogues, still clinging to power as Moroccan resident-general. When Nogues complained that Jews in Morocco and Algeria were demanding restored suffrage, Roosevelt jauntily replied, “The answer to that is very simple, namely, that there just aren’t going to be any elections, so the Jews need not worry about the privilege of voting.” The president also proposed restricting Jewish participation in law, medicine, and other professions to reflect Jewish percentages in “the whole of the North Africa population”. This, he told Nogues, would “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany” for disproportionately dominating certain occupations. Despite his commitment to the large freedoms underpinning the Allied cause, Roosevelt no less than Churchill could be “a great man for the status quo.”

I could rave on about the book but here are just some of the areas that I found most interesting:

The French fight the Americans and the British during the Torch landings with some vigor. But they do not even say a cussword when the Germans land in Tunisia. Guess the French hadn’t decided who their friends were but they knew what the Germans would do if opposed.

Eisenhower is a poor commander in this first big operation. He is a staff guy, doesn’t know much about conducting war and not yet ruthless. He is too concerned with politics, to the detriment of the battles. He will get his ass chewed by Marshall, he will have a major “fail” when presenting a battle plan to the combined US/Brit chiefs and he will be uncertain if he will survive this assignment. But you start to see why he was the right man for the job.

The Brits run circles around the US guys at the Casablanca Conference and get their way on continuing the fight in the Mediterranean. The US wanted to attack mainland Europe ASAP and thought the Brits were focused on strategies that would help maintain her “Empire”. There is deep mistrust on both the US and British sides of each other. The convoluted command structure is explained. We see the continued failure to concentrate forces and soldiers are thrown into battle in small “penny packets”. The Brits distrust US force performance after the defeat at Kasserine Pass. Monty comes into the picture and is an ass. Overall, the Americans from the top down are not yet ruthless enough. Incompetent leaders are weeded out; battle teaches the need for new tactics.

The only complaint I have (it is a major one but I’m not deducting a star) is that Atkinson almost ignores the impact of airpower on the fight. Much of the campaign was fought without Allied air superiority. In fact, the Germans had great air support for most of the campaign. There is just too little on this aspect of the war. The Allies have air superiority at the end of the campaign but there is nothing here on how that happened. A major oversight.

Highest possible recommendation for anyone interested in WWII, expert or just curious. Read this one to learn about the brave young men who fought and died at the start of the American entry to the European campaign. They deserve as much attention as the ones who later fought in Italy, France, Holland and Germany.
africa history military ...more16 s Ed896 118

Book One of the Liberation Trilogy, this is one of the most well written WWII history books I've ever read. Atkinson is an accomplished researcher but also brings his research to life with well placed anecdotes, memoranda, letters and documented conversations. It's almost reading a novel.

The only drawback is the overwhelming scope of his narrative. I sometimes had to read the same material twice to get it into proper context. I also accessed the index many times to refresh my memory on names and places that were referred to earlier in the book.

The maps helped me understand the details of the various battles but there were times I wished I had a huge map of the area being discussed so I could better follow the narrative of what Atkinson was describing.

For someone myself, who was raised with the myths of WWII, this book was an eye-opener. Atkinson discusses the personalities and failings of all the key players, Eisenhower, Giraud, Patton, Alexander, Bradley, Montgomery, Rommel, Von Arnim, Kesselring, Darlan, etc., etc. It appears their failings, at this point in the war, far outweighed their strengths. Those failings almost always resulted in unnecessary casualties. The Generals decide; the soldiers, sailors and airmen die.

I was also able to finally understand the politics of the invasion and the resistance of the Vichy French. The French, by the way, come off as almost comic opera personalities. The North African Arabs and other native peoples in the area are characterized as thieves and opportunists as might be expected of a people under the colonial yoke of France, caught between warring Western powers.

The book is most comprehensive and I could go on for much longer describing its various facets. I would to just say, though, for anyone interested in understanding the 1942 North African Invasion, this book is a must read.

I am looking forward to attacking Volumn Two, covering the Sicilian and Italian campaigns.history non-fiction reviewed15 s Terence1,188 428

I started Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy with his second book - The Day of Battle - but that was such an informative and well written account of the Italian campaign that when I came across a copy of An Army at Dawn in a local used bookstore, I picked it up immediately.

Overall, I wasn’t disappointed.

Despite the occasionally overwrought prose (which I don’t remember so much from The Day of Battle), Atkinson manages to relate the invasion of North Africa and the subsequent campaign to take Tunis with bracing clarity and drama. The careless reader might get lost in the forest of names and fast-breaking events but that’s why God invented indices and cartography – both resources with which this book are amply equipped.

Atkinson is not a historian and the chief theme underlying his story is that North Africa was the crucible that forged an effective
Autor del comentario:
=================================