Stephen Ambrose

Undaunted Courage came at a great time for me. I’d just spent several years in social histories and political analyses, and I was starting to get depressed by the power of critics to strip away glory. Stephen Ambrose’s account of Lewis’ and Clark’s journey may be unfashionably patriotic and heroic, but it’s awed and awe-inspiring, and I needed it.

I picked up Citizen Soldiers shortly afterwards, and was again amazed. Ambrose’s fascination with heroism led him to interview thousands of G.I.s involved in the Normandy invasion and end of World War II. He occasionally employs social or economic analyses, but always trumps these interpretations with words of the G.I.s, often expressed in as direct quotations with little obvious editing. I’m not a World War II buff, but this book almost made me one. (For what it’s worth, many of the anecdotes he recorded appear in the film Saving Private Ryan. Ambrose doesn’t, however, imply that all of these anecdotes happened to a single group of super-soldiers.)

Americans at War is another strong work, with eloquent and passionate essays on soldiers from Little Bighorn to Mai Lai. His political biases come out more strongly in this collection than in the other books, but they aren’t distracting.

With Nothing Like It In The World, my fascination faded, but it’s not Ambrose’s fault. I’ve never really cared about trains. The whole romance is lost on me. My reading a book about the transcontinental railroad by a devotee was as doomed as a deaf person’s reading a book about hand-crafting violins. I can appreciate his research and storytelling technique, but it didn’t grab me. And it left me wondering… considering the breadth of his interests (he also wrote a multi-volume biography of Eisenhower, which I haven’t read, and supposedly has time to teach college classes), how does he manage to know all of this?

The answer to that question came when I started reading another of his books on World War II, which was published after Citizen Soldiers and includes entire paragraphs copied and pasted from the previous book without so much as a self-citation. I put it aside to avoid the page-by-page deja-vu.

Ambrose deserves applause for several of his books, but he lost me as a fan when I felt that I was reading amusingly retold snippets of a committee report instead of a human voice. Lots of other famous writers, Dumas and Michener, employed huge numbers of assistants to research their books. I don’t really like Dumas and Michener either.