The historian Stephen Ambrose has devoted his life’s work to studying men — men like the American soldiers who won the Second World War. In the course of his long career, he’s interviewed hundreds of veterans about what kept them going in battle, and in such popular and highly acclaimed volumes as the 1993 Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and the 1997 Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, he discovered that it was, in part, pride in their country and a sense of purpose they found hard to talk about.
But he discovered that it was also, in part, an experience they found it easy to describe: the sustaining friendship of the men with whom they served. And now, with Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, Ambrose has written his paean to that sort of friendship, a quirky, uneven, personal book about the male camaraderie that is “one of the joys of my adult life.”
