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Start giftingBefore Their Time
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Learn moreIn this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he—by playing dead—was the only one to survive.
Robert Kotlowitz (1924–2012) a native of Baltimore and a graduate of Johns Hopkins, worked as Managing Editor of Harper’s magazine and for more than two decades as Director of Programming and Broadcasting for WNET in New York.
Grover Gardner (a.k.a. Tom Parker) is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“This memoir does a superb job of sympathizing with all those puzzled boys, dead well before their time.”
“Combat soldiers’ memories are like flames or waves on a beach; they seem the same, but their patterns are always changing. Robert Kotlowitz…has produced…the model for such memories…[A] superb narrative.”
“His straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier’s life, as well as his own teenager’s naivete…An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war—the kind that history overlooks.”
“Kotlowitz writes with skill and mordant humor of the infantryman’s life, of the incredible instinct to survive, of ‘the sounds…never before heard’… His fine memoir belongs on readers’ shelves alongside such books as Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle, primary documents of a terrible time.”
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