Time Goes to War: From World War II to the War on Terror, Stories of America in Battle and on the Home Front

For connoisseurs of history's rough draft comes this anthology of Time magazine's coverage of conflicts from the Second World War to Operation Enduring Freedom. Full of local color (""An empty Chianti bottle lay in the desert where an Italian had dropped it in his 1942 retreat"") and two-fisted prose (""the Jap ships lay like dozing ducks""), these war dispatches are models of concise, impressionistic writing. They're accompanied by lots of vivid pictures, sometimes grouped into photo essays on topics such as the home front, the supporting cast (medics, cooks, service animals) and USO entertainers. The short and snappy reporting can seem shallow, and sometimes lapses into mere embellishments of Pentagon press briefings (""The Viet Cong's once-cocky hunters are now the cowering hunted,"" the magazine reported in 1965) but some pieces, like Robert Sherrod's taut and moving report on the battle for Iwo Jima, are still gems.