Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged)

Author - Powers, James, Ron Bradley ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Audio Download Book item from audible.com was reviewed on 6-Nov-2008.

Search ISBN:B000GPCNTU offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) Reference Book. Classifications : Subjects Arts & Photography Biographies & Memoirs Business & Investing Children's Books Comics & Graphic Novels Computers & Internet Cooking, Food & Wine Entertainment Gay & Lesbian Health, Mind & Bod . Click the following link to view the cover of Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged).

Related topics: Subjects. Arts & Photography. Children´s Books. Entertainment. Gay & Lesbian. Health, Mind & Body. History. Home & Garden. Law. Medicine.

1) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. I really liked this book...not because of the writing style or the research, but because it made me think about the men that fight for our country. I never put much thought into that photo even though I have seen it numerous times before. I didn´t realize the stir that it caused and how it was viewed.

I did find it interesting and informative, but I am a person that finds history boring. However, since reading this book I have developed a taste and I am now buying a reading books about both World Wars. I am not sure if it´s a good thing or bad thing. It´s either this book was inspiring, or there were a lot of holes that I needed filled. I think it´s both.

The writing was not the best. It was hard at some points and I had to re-read sections. I noticed a bias in favor of the Marines. It wasn´t very objective when it came to different branced and their contribution to the war in the Pacific. The author did rub me the wrong way a few times. At the beginning when they are on the island, when he seems to slam Rene at every opportunity, and just the idea that is Father didn´t want any of this and yet he still wrote this book.
¤

2) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. In short summation, a very well written book, however I am left wondering if the author is a sympathizer with the Japanese or a patriotic entrepreneur? A sharp Bushido blade to swallow either way. Remember, James make him proud.¤

3) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. James Bradley has written a loving chronicle of a battle of almost unimaginable horror that took place on the unlikely volcanic island that has embedded its name in military and our national history as ´Iwo Jima´. His father was caught up in the events that unfolded on that diminutive, blood-soaked island, but also in the well-intention civilian environment back home, where the War Bond campaign seemed noble enough to justify almost any means.

Anyone tempted to bury Iwo Jima in the impersonal language of large, inhuman forces that is characteristic of a historiography which scoffs at the idea that Great Men change history ought to read this book at least as carefully as Bradley has crafted it. Men and women, many whose names now require special effort if they are to be remembered, laid down an incalculable sacrifice to secure this island stepping stone in the Second War´s Pacific Campaign. There was nothing romantic about the task they were asked to accomplished. In fact, it was Wartime Romance that disfigured the lives of several of Bradley´s protagonists.

Yet somehow, these warriors performed the actions that large men required of them. Most of them would simply prefer to forget what they saw there on Iwo Jima.

They should be afforded that luxury. The rest of us should not.

Something salutatory happens when a nation remembers the sacrifices that made it what it has come to be, particularly when it does so without assigning heroic nobility to men and women who more accurately describe their work as simple duty. A reader, properly in awe of duty´s extreme measures, can still stand in awe of it.

This is their due and the responsibility of those of us who wish to be responsible remembrers.

James Bradley helps us on that way as few writers can.

He has written an awesome, astonishing, ennobling book.¤

4) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. Perhaps the best book I´ve ever read. This book captures the action, the drama, the immense human sacrifices paid by the soldiers, their courage, the brutality of war, the history of the era and the war, the biographical background of the young soldiers and their families both before, during and after the war. Superb isn´t strong enough to describe how well written this book is as it tells an amazing story about our young men you go off to war to save their country and the world from ruthless military dictatorships. The stories are gut wrenching and tear jerking. You will travel into the belly of the beast that is war and be nourished by the courage and committment to the mission´s success and emotionally devastated by the carnage and loss of life and limb that followed these poor souls 24/7. The men and women who fought in WW2 truly were American´s greatest generation. Read this book.¤

5) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. I gave this as a birthday gift to my husband and I finished reading it before he did. I thought it was well researched and written. Very sad, but helped me understand what they went through. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the famous picture and statue.
¤

6) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America.

In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima--and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island´s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.

Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.

To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men´s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific´s most crucial island--an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo--three were killed during the battle--were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley´s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: "The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn´t come back."

Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.
¤

7) Audio Download Book Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged) by audible.com. The Battle of Iwo Jima, fought in the winter of 1945 on a rocky island south of Japan, brought a ferocious slice of hell to earth: in a month´s time, more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers would die defending a patch of ground a third the size of Manhattan, while nearly 26,000 Americans fell taking it from them. The battle was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, and it produced one of World War II´s enduring images: a photograph of six soldiers raising an American flag on the flank of Mount Suribachi, the island´s commanding high point.

One of those young Americans was John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who a few days before had braved enemy mortar and machine-gun fire to administer first aid to a wounded Marine and then drag him to safety. For this act of heroism Bradley would receive the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor.

Bradley, who died in 1994, never mentioned his feat to his family. Only after his death did Bradley´s son James begin to piece together the facts of his father´s heroism, which was but one of countless acts of sacrifice made by the young men who fought at Iwo Jima. Flags of Our Fathers recounts the sometimes tragic life stories of the six men who raised the flag that February day--one an Arizona Indian who would die following an alcohol-soaked brawl, another a Kentucky hillbilly, still another a Pennsylvania steel-mill worker--and who became reluctant heroes in the bargain. A strongly felt and well-written entry in a spate of recent books on World War II, Flags gives a you-are-there depiction of that conflict´s horrible arenas--and a moving homage to the men whom fate brought there. --Gregory McNamee¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 4-Dec-2008, , 480-330-5X0-4X0-TUB-D8B-8

Flags of Our Fathers (Unabridged), Book, Image © audible.com

Search: audible.com, Book Posters, Book Art