FO Books

Tom Wolf has penned an absolute mess of a book, a schizophrenic melange of revisionist history and self-flagellation. Choosing a style that wanders from a bad imitation of Jack Keroac to a weak attmpt to evoke the writings of St. Thomas A., Wolf intermittently takes turns heaping praise upon the American ski troops of the Second World War as his heroes, and then strangely denigrating them as brutal warriors and shameless self-promotors.

Relying on the testimony of aging Nazi ski troops (quoted without attribution because they "wouldn't talk otherwise"), Wolf concludes that the members of the U.S. 10th Mountian Division were blood-thirsty soldiers who fought on the Italian front at the end of the war with far more vigor than was necessary for the "mop-up" job they had been assigned. The result, according to the Nazis and Wolf, was a horrendous and unnecessary spilling of blood on both sides. To take the statements of these men at face value is disgraceful. Not to identify them (Waffen SS? ) is just plain dishonest. Wolf also sites as one of his main influences an American priest forced to expatriate to the Alps after charges of pederasty. How nice!

Perhaps the one aspect of Mr. Wolf's book that does deserve praise is his mention of General Mark Clark's suspect behavior at the end of the war. Having squandered the lives of thousands of American troops at Rapido River and on other battlefields throughout south and central Italy, Clark insisted on keeping the Italian front an active meat grinder long after it became apparent that its tactical importance was at best minimal. This is an aspect of the Italian campaign that needs far more examination by historians than has previously been paid to it. And when I say historians, I do not include Mr. Wolf in that category. Historians, for example, generally footnote.

It is clear that Mr. Wolf has some personal bone to pick with many veterans of the 10th Mountain Division, perhaps because they would not accept a draft dodger from the Vietnam era like Wolf as one of their own. (Wolf opted not to go to jail for his convictions, preferring a flight to Europe to ski with his Nazi friends for several years in Germany and Austria). That's life, Mr. Wolf. Get over it.

Poorly written, low quality diagrams, and says nothing new about aerodynamics. The author changes the names of concepts and theories that science has known about for some time and then thinks that he has discovered something new. I sent mine back.

Here we go again. ¡With a couple of texts like this to carry, who needs a bullet-proof backpack? I took Spanish a half-century ago, and my text covered two years in about 250 pages of 8x5 inch text. The language has changed a bit in the interval, but certainly not enough to merit such an expansion in volume!