"Absolutely gripping"
Early reviews of my new D-Day oral history
I tweeted yesterday that this Memorial Day feels different to me, given that I’ve spent the last year immersed in thousands of memories from D-Day veterans—sifting through their reflections on their service and their fight oh so many years ago. As part of the research for WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, I collected about 5,000 oral histories, memoirs, letters, unit reports, videos, battlefield citations, newspaper and magazine articles, official reports, telegrams, radio transcripts, and other ephemera. To me, this 80th anniversary of D-Day next week stands as a critical transitional milestone, as the last of the Greatest Generation passes from the scene and D-Day shifts entirely from memory to history.
My hope with this project was to tell the most complete and comprehensive version of D-Day possible, knowing that we have today effectively every memory of that day we will.
The resulting book, WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, comes out next Tuesday and the early reviews are just coming in. One of my prime reading demographics has always been “America’s Dads,” and I was excited this weekend to get my first “independent dad” review from the father-in-law of a college friend: It’s a hit!
(Reminder: If you’re interested in preordering a signed book, Phoenix Books, my local indie in Burlington, is offering the first 150 orders with little replica brass D-day “crickets,” like what the paratroopers used to find each other that first dark night in Normandy. There are around 55 left, if you’re interested in a Father’s Day present or reading yourself!)
Beyond the “random text from friend’s dad” reviews, though, I teared up Friday reading an incredible new review of the audiobook of WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE. As you may remember, the audiobook of THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY was a masterpiece—a multi-voice, full-cast symphony that won the best audiobook of 2020, beating even Michelle Obama’s memoir. Well, if anything, the Simon & Schuster audio team surpassed that with the new D-Day audiobook.
The Washington Post’s book critic Ron Charles wrote a rapturous review on Friday in his weekly newsletter, the kind that an author can only dream about. “This 19-hour audiobook performed by Edoardo Ballerini, Simon Jones, Saskia Maarleveld, Holter Graham and others is absolutely gripping,” he writes. “It all comes to life in the performances of this massive cast of narrators, who switch voices and accents with such dexterity that it’s hard not to feel like you’re talking to the participants themselves… You’ll fall under the spell of this kaleidoscopic performance.”
Producer Scott Sherratt, who also led the effort of the 9/11 audiobook, juggled dozens of speakers and news clips to assemble that incredible “kaleidoscopic performance” that makes the voices come alive, as you weave in and out of dozens of accents, nationalities, and ethnicities across the 700 participants who make up the book. I’ve been listening these last few nights—I’m about three hours into the nineteen hours of the audiobook—and feel like I’m learning all sorts of new nuances of my own book. The audiobook teems with the ambition that rarely exists in publishing anymore, and I couldn’t be more grateful to Simon & Schuster for embracing it. I’m awed by Scott’s work.
And so was Ron.
As he wrote:
The general dimensions of June 6, 1944, may be well known, but “When the Sea Came Alive” begins long before. Graff notes that about a third of the story covers the months and days leading up to D-Day.
It’s safe to say that logistics and requisitions have never sounded so thrilling. What the military didn’t possess had to be acquired. What didn’t exist had to be invented. We hear directly from people tasked with planning and building this incalculably complex and risky maneuver. Everyone from 19-year-old paratroopers to construction workers to Winston Churchill speaks to us in words alternately confident, irritated, alarmed and hopeful.
I found myself continually surprised. A section about America’s awkward attempts to export anti-Black racism to Britain is deeply sobering. It’s hard to fathom how “the entire civilian population from South Hams” was evacuated in just six weeks to create a training area. And the tales of how actors carried out elaborate deceptions to keep the Germans guessing sounds like inspiration for John le Carré.
Then, of course, the hellish day itself explodes across the beaches and through the air. Soldiers describe the clash of strategy and chaos, heroism and panic, victory and carnage. Every voice here is part of a chorus that heralded the moment when the world teetered between freedom and tyranny. Graff’s decision to include German testimonies adds even more tension.
Given the political situation in the United States today, when some of our leaders are so complacent,even enthusiastic, about the resurgence of fascism, the power of this story feels spiked with foreboding.
I’ll have a lot more to say in the next ten days about D-Day and its meaning today, but I hope you’ll consider listening or reading WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE and reckoning in the weeks ahead with that the last moment when “the world teetered between freedom and tyranny.”
If you’d like to see me talk about the book, please join me Thursday night at 7 pm ET for the virtual book launch online with Phoenix Books or, if you’re around New York, I’ll be speaking next Tuesday night at Roosevelt House at 6 pm with D-Day historian Craig Symonds.
GMG