Day Nine - Lost History

Caught up at last!

There's something wrong with this picture...

Lately I've been reading popular histories of the Second World War, mostly to bone up on basic knowledge of the time period before delving into a more serious study of specific aspects of the time period for a novel I'm contemplating. I just finished Rick Atkinson's book 'An Army at Dawn', which I liked a lot despite some of its quirks. After that I was planning on reading Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose... except that 32 pages in, the book skips to page 65, eliminating most of the detail of the hedgerow battles post-D-day. Not a good thing.

So I spend the day on other pursuits, but mostly hunting around for the receipt so I can exchange the daggum thing for a book with all it's pages.

Amusingly, I spoke at length with my dad today and he too owns an Ambrose book in his library that is not only missing pages, but whole chapters are out of order! He keeps it around for it's novelty and because he bought it at a library sale and paid maybe a buck for it. I knew that there had been a furor a few years before he died about the purity of his research, but shuffling pages and chapters in hopes that we won't notice seems a bit extreme...