So, Stephen Ambrose is said to have heavily borrowed from another book in his preparation of the latest book from his history factory,
Wild Blue? I read it, or rather listened to the abridged version on tape (free review copy). It was breezy and thin.
Undaunted Courage is a wonderful book, as is
Citizen Soldiers. His Pulitzer Prize- winning D-Day is repetitive to the point of boring(Watch Saving Private Ryan instead). His style, working from oral histories, can contribute to his aggressive use of previously written material, I guess. The Weekly Standard
(subscription info) broke the news and said this about
Thomas Childers, the author Ambrose footnoted but borrowed extremely long quotes from:
Childers has not mounted an effort to publicize Ambrose’s use of his work; I heard about the similarities from a colleague, not from Childers, who actually assigns two of Ambrose’s books,
“Band of Brothers” and D-Day
in his classes. Childers said he looked up the index when he first got “The Wild Blue” and flipped to the parts where his work was footnoted. His first reaction was, “this sounds awfully familiar. It didn’t make me mad. It made me disappointed.” Childers said he hasn’t written Ambrose. “What would I say?” he asked. “Shame on you?” He added he “doesn’t want to go after Stephen Ambrose. The man has done an awful lot of good work.”
(By the way, is it obvious from this post that I’m using it to try out my Amazon associate program linking skills? I only have to sell a few hundred bucks of books to get a free tee-shirt or something.)
