A Critical Book Review For The Bitter Road To Freedom. “The Bitter Road to Freedom A New History of the Liberation of Europe” is written by William I. Hitchcock. William I. Hitchcock has earned a bachelor from Kenyon college and his PHD from Yael. William I. Hitchcock is now a professor at the University of Virginia and his work focuses on history from the 20th century. The book Bitter Road to Freedom focuses on WW2 and shows the true results of war and liberation that you normally do not hear about when covering WW2 history. The book also gives the perspective of not only the soldiers who fought but from the civilians as well. The review of this book will discuss things such as the kinds of sources used to reinforce the author’s thesis, the author’s treatment of the topic and how the book was constructed. In the beginning of the book William I. Hitchcock opens up the book by starting the reader off in a Luxembourg cemetery where he reads off a memorial tablet that
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50 pages worth to be exact is dedicated to citations. This helps to not only paint a accurate picture for the reader but validate his points. The majority of the sources he used came from civilian diaries. However, he also cited newspapers, government collected data, and a few secondary sources. One weakness however that is present in a book like this one is that we don’t get to see what happens to specific towns after the war or get accounts of what the civilian life ends up being like years after the war. Following the theme of paradoxes and irony is the fact that Hitchcock broke his book up into 3 arches. In the conclusion of the book he discusses how most people look back on the war as such when he says “The story is usually told in three acts. It opens with the daring cross-channel invasion of France… American power finally break the German
50 pages worth to be exact is dedicated to citations. This helps to not only paint a accurate picture for the reader but validate his points. The majority of the sources he used came from civilian diaries. However, he also cited newspapers, government collected data, and a few secondary sources. One weakness however that is present in a book like this one is that we don’t get to see what happens to specific towns after the war or get accounts of what the civilian life ends up being like years after the war. Following the theme of paradoxes and irony is the fact that Hitchcock broke his book up into 3 arches. In the conclusion of the book he discusses how most people look back on the war as such when he says “The story is usually told in three acts. It opens with the daring cross-channel invasion of France… American power finally break the German