Red Army Resurgent

By Time Life Books WWII Series

Growing up I remember seeing commercials for Time Life Books. Usually it was for Mysteries of the Unknown (their best selling series), but I also remember seeing one for The Old West. Anyway fast forward to High School and one of the few times that I checked out a book from the library (yeah I wasn’t that much of a reader until after college) and I read a couple of the books from the True Crime Series. Fast forward another decade or so and to the first time I visited my Mother in law’s house. What do I find in the bookcase? Time Life Books. She had about 4 different series in varying completeness. My wife and her sister told me how they remembered getting the books in the mail yet no one had ever told me. Well I guess I had never really brought it up, I had forgotten about them.

Now travel to 2001 or 2002 (I forget) and what have I found? EBay. That’s right, you can not only find Time Life Books on EBay but you can usually get them are really good prices. Instead of the $19.95 a book, try around a dollar or two when you buy a the books in lots or complete sets. I went a little crazy and bought a handful of sets, enough to keep me satisfied for almost 3 years when I figure that I would only read a book a week. Well I quickly read through the Epic of Flight series (my grandfather had actually given me one book, The Jet Age, as a birthday gift many years ago) and started in on the WWII books.

At 39 books I knew it would take a while to read through. Well I read the first 3 or 4 and then time went by and before I knew it it had been a couple of years and I was only a little over halfway through the series. I was starting to forget the early books.

This year I ended up reading 7 books from the WWII series. I guess it could have been more but I switched over to the What Life Was Like in the Age of ______ books. I guess I used those to jumpstart my interest in the Time Life books again.

Seeing as how I’m reflecting back on my reads for 2007 many months since I read most of the books on my list; that and as history books they don’t lend themselves to a review, I’ll try and relate any interesting bits from each one but don’t always count on it. For my impressions of Red Army Resurgent go to The Soviet Juggernaut. Two books about the eastern front close together kinda combined into one in my brain.