Rating: 
Summary: A Battle Too Far
Review: How much you enjoy and benefit from this book depends entirely on what you bring to it. If you, as I, are a World War I "buff" and have read just about anything you could get your hands on about the great conflict, it will be a disapppintment. On the other hand, if you are just getting started on the subject and wish a solid overview of the tragic Flanders fighting which devoured more men than any other sector, this may be the book for you. But be warned, Groom's treatment is entirely derivative, obviously relying entirely on secondary sources. Consequently, he offers no fresh insights either into the fighting or the respective strategies behind it and, in general, betrays a relatively amateurish approach to the subject. Overall, a decent stab at a complex story by a non-historian, but one that evidences its author's shortcomings throughout.
Rating: 
Summary: An Ambrose for Word War I
Review: I have a long-standing interest in history in general and military history in particular. After reading dozens if not hundreds of these books, I have found that the ones that stick with me are the ones that are beautifully written."A Storm in Flanders" is such a book, focusing on the British experience in the Ypres Salient during World War I. Groom wrote "Forrest Gump," as well as several history books. He knows how to put a sentence together and how to tell a gripping story. Once I picked this book up and started reading, I was hooked. Much as Stephen Ambrose has done in his elegant books about World War II, Groom moves seamlessly between the generals in their chateaus and the grunts in their trenches. He makes use of diaries and poetry to tell the human story of a struggle that is all too often reduced to an abstract description of maneuver and battle. And he is very fair in his assessments--he acknowledges the criticisms of General Haig and many of the other leaders of the war, but he is always careful to balance these views with other considerations. The result is a well-told tale, fair and sympathetic to everyone involved. The story of the Ypres Salient is not pretty. Groom does not pull his punches and does his best to give the reader, sitting in a comfortable armchair, some sense of just how horrible the Great War was. In a passage that I found especially memorable, Groom quotes Lieutenant Alfred J. Angel of the Royal Fusiliers during Third Ypres: "The stench was horrible, for the bodies were not corpses in the normal sense. With all the shell-fire and bombardments they'd been continually disturbed, and the whole place was a mess of filth and slime and bones and decomposing bits of flesh." How anyone could live and fight in this hell on earth without going mad is simply beyond my comprehension, yet many British, French and German soldiers managed to do just that for four years running. Groom doesn't delve too deeply into the psychology of the soldiers, observing that "the search for 'why' and 'how' remains elusive and any effort to reason it out is to fashion a mirror of hell itself." He is probably right in saying that "[a] truly sobering thing would be a glimpse of what was actually going on in their minds during the fighting. That would not only be sobering; it would be perfectly frightening." If you like a "A Storm in Flanders," I would recommend two other books. The first is "Face of Battle" by John Keegan, which tries to explain how soldiers keep fighting despite the horrors of war and the threat of instant death. The second is Sir Martin Gilbert's "The First World War," which describes the entire war using a relentless chronology that is truly compelling. Neither of these books is as well written as Groom's "A Storm in Flanders," but both are well worth the effort to read.
Rating:
Summary: Ypres Salient
Review: I thought this book was excellnet and highly recommand it for anyone intrested in the First World War. It gave equal treatment to the big picture of world statagy and the common infantryman at the front so one could understand what was going on in the larger context of the war. It never fails to amaze me that the useless slaughter was allowed to continue for all those years to really no purpose. When one considers that the British accepted 1,000 casualties a day on the Western Front to be simple "wastage" and calculated this figure into the number of replacements required, its difficult to understand how the army kept fighting. A well written and fast paced book.
Rating:
Summary: Nonfict War Book for female history-lover's reading at pool
Review: In response to one of the reviewer's comments that this book "dumbs down" the information, that is what I love about this book. I enjoy history, especially historical fiction, and this book is light enough for me to read at the pool. It's emphasis on how the war affected people makes it more interesting reading for us stereotypical females than many war books(I hated reading Red Badge of Courage in high school). As to the comment that the dumbing down was done to attract American readers, I think that's necessary. Most of us relate to the Revolution, Civil War and WW II, but see WW I as a footnote in history. One of my husband's scientific colleagues in Great Britain assures him that is not the case there! I had absolutely no interest in WW I, even though my grandfather fought in it, until our family went to Yper to see the Cat Parade in 2000. There our daughter(then 4) and I became much more interested in this particular part of WW I. This book is an enjoyable light summer read which will educate many of us about a topic of which we are woefully ignorant.
Rating:
Summary: A Book on World War I For Everyone
Review: My background regarding World War I is minimal, and I wanted to gain some basic information regarding The Great War. I took a chance on A Storm in Flanders since it seemed to be of modest length (262 pages), and was pleasantly surprised. World War I was expected to be a relatively quick war, certainly not into a period of a year or more as happened, but author Winston Groom provides the reader with a horrific description of how horrible war can be. The focus of this book is the area of Flanders in the country of Belgium where the earth was literally fertilized with the bodies of dead soldiers. The history of the poem "In Flanders Field" is here in addition to the British poet Siegfried Sassoon who tossed his Military Cross into the Mersey River and uttered some unpatriotic remarks that could have gotten him court martialed had he not been popular in England and a friend of Winston Churchill. Instead, he was placed into a sanitarium. Throughout the book my thoughts were of what a waste of life on both sides this was, and the thoughts of the soldiers on the futility of war. This is a book that is of interest to World War I historians in addition to those whose knowledge of the Great War is limited. I fit into the latter category, and if you do, also, this is a book that can "fill in the gaps" of your knowledge of World War I.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent account
Review: No footnotes, a poor bibliography--and still five stars? Yes, this book should have footnotes and a decent bibliography, but it is such a felicitous treatment of its intensely interesting subject that it merits five stars. I have long looked on In Flander Fields, by Leon Wolff (read by me 8 June 1965, and that year winner of my Best Book Read This Year award) as having told me all I needed to know about the Flanders fighting. But that book covered only the 1917 time in Flanders. This book does the first battle of Ypres in 1914, the second (in 1915), the third in 1917, and the 4th in 1918. In fact, this short book does a able job on the war itself--and serves as a bit of corrective to Wolff's damning view of Haig. Not that Haig gets the kind of favorable treatment that John Terraine gives him in his book, Ordeal of Victory (read by me with much appreciation on 16 May 1986), but one can see that there is something to be said for Terraine's thesis that the foundations of victory were laid on the Somme in 1916 and in Flanders in 1917 and that if those battles had not been fought the German drive in 1918 would have won the war for Germany. Groom is a popular historian only but he does an able job in this book, and I found it compelling reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Storytelling, 4. History, 3.
Review: This book is a tremendous work of story-telling. Winston Groom brings the allied armies WWI experience in the Yres salient alive through use of personal letters and journals, but still keeps us abreast of the larger picture at both the command and theater levels. I have read few accounts that so effectively balances both of these objectives, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting such a small, albeit crucially important, part of the western front under the microscope.
Historically speaking, I am troubled that this book reads like the official British history [read propoganda] of the war. The position that the war was the result of German militarism, and that England and the U.S. were forced into the war by German barbarism are not so much argued as asserted. At every chance Groom seems to take the opportunity to point out the brutality of the German armies and their commanders, but understates or calls into question the same on the opposite side. There is little to no investigation of the German soldier's life in the salient except for the few references to Adolf Hitler, which itself carries a clear connotation, which leaves a vision of the German soldiers as nameless faceless killing machines. This is interesting because it stands in direct contrast to the wonderful photographs contained in the book, which shows the German armies mired in the same desolate wasteland as the allies. I would have even been satisfied with him focusing on the allied soldiers, if not for the clear biased for the allied official history of the war. Since this book was basically a character study of the allied armies in the Ypres salient, rather than a detailed analysis of the war at large, I don't think this was the place for such value-judgements. As a junior arm-chair historian, with a great interest in the broader issues of the Great War, I found this detracted from the overall experience.
In the end I would enthusiastically recommend this book, with the usual historical caveat of know your author, so that the wheat can be separated from the chaff.
Rating:
Summary: A Storm in Flanders
Review: This is a solid attempt for a novelist and non historian, and Groom is certainly a good novelist. But, if you had to have your speeen removed, would you go to a good dentist?
Rating:
Summary: Heroism and Heartbreak
Review: This is an excellent history of one of the most costly campaigns in a costly war.
Groom writes this book for American audiences, who are generally ignorant of this battle. As such, English audiences may find much of the material familiar ground. But for us Yanks, this books captures the slaughter of this battle, slaughter on a scale we cannot imagine and that Americans have never seen (to give some perspective, imagine a Gettysburg that lasts over three years, instead of three days).
Groom has the unique (alas) ability in historic writing to combine the strategic, tactical, and human aspects of war in a book. He clearly and simply explains the German plan for conquest, the Allied's plan (if you want to call it that) for defense, and how the stalemate of trench warfare emerged from the early optimism of 1914. This is aided by several EXCELLENT maps.
However, the book also relates forcefully the human cost of war. Through the published recollections of veterans on both sides, a ghastly picture emerges of the Hell that was WWI. Some of the stories are heartbreaking: of young soliders crying for their mothers before recollecting their strength and charging to their death, of poets writing beautiful verse in the trenches, then dying horribly, of thousands of men who died anonymous deaths in tunnels and trenches in and under no man's land. Above all, the constant stink of battle, death, and decay permeates the book as it permeated the battlefield.
And yet what finally emerges is the heroism of the common British soldier, who was sacrificed by the thousands, yet still withstood the final German offensive of 1918. But this victory comes at a terrible cost: the destruction of the old British Army, and the sacrifice of an entire generation.
Even if you are not interested in WW1 history (which I was not before I read this book) read it! It is one of those rare books that rise above common military history into something much grander.
Rating:
Summary: A Decent Narrative With Little Depth
Review: Winston Groom may well be a fine novelist (I have never read any other book by him), but as a historian he is lacking. His narrative style is fairly smooth and can be very gripping, but it occasionally stumbles over his often peculiar word choice and several grammatical errors. I often wondered where his editor was. "A Storm In Flanders" offers no new perspectives on the war, a point made by another reader review here, but that shouldn't really be an automatic point against it. It is rare to see such a light treatment of so specific a topic. For readers seeking a light overview of the First World War, I most certainly recommend A.J.P. Taylor's "Illustrated History of the First World War" over this. A true failing here is Groom's undisguised bias that makes an accolade on the back cover of the book about 'even-handedness' laughable. Groom never fails to lump togther every German at the Western Front under the title 'barbarian.' Groom also makes no effort to hide his disdain or admiration for some important figures of the time, and offers the reader little to justify his favoritism. Groom is at his best when he is describing the conditions of the trenches and the experiences of the individuals, but there's very little of this that isn't just regurgitation from previously published memoirs and journals. All in all, this book is at best an often entertaining light read, but not for someone seeking an in-depth analysis of the fighting at the Ypres Salient.
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