A disappointingly sentimental celebration of male friendship that
reveals almost nothing about the emotional lives of men.
Bestselling historian Ambrose (Undaunted Courage, 1996, etc.) is a
brilliant chronicler of public events, but his exploration of male
friendship is exasperatingly shallow. How do young men become
friends, according to Ambrose? They might "join the same
fraternity, date the same or similar girls from the same sorority,
play on the same [sports] teams, all things that lead to genuine
connection." As a University of Wisconsin freshman, Ambrose
befriends a fraternity brother because "[w]e liked beer, we liked
to sing when drunk, we liked girls" and enjoyed the outdoors. This
hardly exhausts the infinite variety of male friendship. Ambrose
portrays men as "comrades" in the public arena of sports, politics,
and combat, but says little about the private roles men typically
play - as nurturing fathers, perhaps, or supportive husbands. In
Ambrose's estimation, men bond by sharing a goal. The friendships
Ambrose has chosen to celebrate are largely forged in wartime:
soldiers hitting the beaches on D-Day, George Armstrong Custer and
his brother Tom dying together at Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse and
his warrior friend He Dog slaughtering Custer's men, Dwight
Eisenhower and George Patton working side by side to destroy the
Nazi war machine. Ambrose recycles a lot of material from his
previous books and throws in a few anecdotes about his own lifelong
friendships. None of it plunges much below surface platitudes. We
learn, for example, that Patton and Eisenhower "both had a deep
interest in tanks and armored warfare." But where are the men who
simply enjoy each other's company? A vaguely nostalgic and
disorganized exploration meant, no doubt, as a Father's Day gift
book. Not Ambrose's freest hour. (Kirkus Reviews)
From the author of Undaunted Courage and D-Day comes this celebration of male friendship, taken both from the pages of history and from Ambrose's own life.
Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward -- he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them for a lifetime, overcoming distance and misunderstandings. He writes of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a golden gift for friendship and who shared a perfect trust with his younger brother Milton in spite of their apparently unequal stations. With great feeling, Ambrose brings to life the relationships of the young soldiers of Easy Company who fought and died together from Normandy to Germany, and he describes with admiration three who fought in different armies on different sides in that war and became friends later. He recounts the friendships of Lewis and Clark and of Crazy Horse and He Dog, and he tells the story of the Custer brothers who died together at the Little Big Horn.
Comrades concludes with the author's moving recollection of his own friendship with his father. "He was my first and always most important friend. I didn't learn that until the end, when he taught me the most important thing, that the love of father-son-father-son is a continuum, just as love and friendship are expansive."
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