Contemporary Literary Criticism | Ambrose, Stephen - Josiah Bunting III (review date 21 December 1998)

Josiah Bunting III (review date 21 December 1998)

SOURCE: “Fighting Words,” in National Review, December 21, 1998, pp. 60-2.

[In the following review, Bunting offers positive assessment of The Victors and Ambrose's focus on the military experiences of individual soldiers.]

For whom is serious history written? The American academy has long answered: for other university scholars. On occasion, works of academic scholarship become popular: one can think of any number of such books. But in the eyes of university colleagues, their authors as a consequence soon become suspect—quietly derided, yet envied. Historians vulgarly praised as “good writers” are similarly fretted over. Propulsive narrative, pellucid prose, epigrammatical assertion or conclusion, vivid exemplification: such things virtually guarantee the wary regard of other professional historians.

There is a sub-species of history writing that particularly...

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