stephen e ambrose nothing like it in the world

When Ambrose discovered he had lung cancer, he said the likely terminal diagnosis was in some respects liberating because 'you can do whatever the hell you want. The old soldiers seemed to relate well to the author, a plain-speaking man who got to the point and wasn't afraid to mix in a few curse words for emphasis. I still think so,' he once said.įor the most part, war veterans were eager to help Ambrose and entrusted many of the artifacts they had saved from World War II to the D-Day museum. 'I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. Isn't this fascinating?''Īmbrose, who called himself a hero worshipper, said his focus on World War II developed from working on his Eisenhower biography and his memory of GI's returning home from World War II when he was 10 years old. 'He was always grabbing people by their lapels and saying, 'Listen to this. 'His great gift was that he refused to allow people to think history was boring,' said Brinkley, who also collaborated on several books with Ambrose. Other books addressed former Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Lewis and Clark expeditions of the American West. While best known for his World War II books and as the founder of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Ambrose wrote about numerous aspects of American history. He 'combined high standards of scholarship with the capacity to make history come alive for a lay audience,' Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger said. With unadorned but lively prose, Ambrose continued to captivate readers as he churned out history books at an industrial pace, publishing more than 30, including a half-dozen more best-sellers such as 'Citizen Soldiers' and 'The Wild Blue.' 'He was saying, 'There's all this obsession with high command, but the real story is these citizen soldiers who still live in every town and hamlet in the United States,'' said Douglas Brinkly, a former pupil who took over for Ambrose as director of the University of New Orleans' Eisenhower Center.

Stephen e ambrose nothing like it in the world