Wings and Tracks

by David Childs

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

David Childs is a Professor Emeritus in Politics at the University of Nottingham. His considerable contribution to the advancement of German studies has helped academics, ambassadors, business leaders, government ministers, the armed services and students develop a greater knowledge of the history and politics of Germany (former East - GDR, & West - FRG).

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty neat book. I had to speed read it for work so that I could ask intelligent questions when the author came to visit. I will have to say it was slightly difficult to get my head wrapped around it written in the present tense but as soon as you though about it like it was him being in the room telling the story to you it helped with a lot of things. This story is an amazing sliver of what went on during WWII. The anecdotes were fantastic. It really brought a human face to events that have taken on mythic, grandiose iconography in our history. The biggest holdup of the whole book was how it blended the timeline - you jumped from WWII events to his childhood back to WWII and so on. The biggest rough patch of the whole holdup came when the author went back to Europe on a memorial tour - he intercut with WWII flashbacks but because both were in the present tense with insubstantial paragraph breaks between the two you really had to be on the ball figuring out when in history you were. Still an awesome read though and well worth it.