Fighting them on the Beaches

Looking at his bibliography, Nigel Cawthorne appears to be a rent-an-author, the James Patterson of non-fiction, churning them out at the rate of several a year, on a vast range of topics. Accordingly, Fighting Them On The Beaches contains all the hallmarks of production-line writing. To maintain his fast-paced, confusing and sometimes disordered narrative (which possibly mirrors the manner in which he wrote it), Cawthorne relies heavily on battlefield anecdotes, many of which read like old soldier beer talk, and at least one or two urban legends. Facts or events are thrown at us holus bolus with little context or explanation, the rather simple maps are difficult to relate to the text, and the whole book is full of glaring typographical errors. At the very least you need Wikipedia and Google Maps close at hand, or you'll never figure out what's going on.

For all that, I learned a lot about D-Day, an important event about which I'd never known more than could be expressed in a brief paragraph. I just wouldn't recommend this book to anybody - there are great numbers of far superior books on the topic, as my WW2-mad son was keen to point out. And he'd know. He told me not to read this, but since it had been gifted to me I felt I had to make the effort.