THE SOLDIER’S TRUTH: Ernie Pyle and The Story of World War II

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Tuesday, Jun 6, 2023  7pm

Location

visit website

Details

THE SOLDIER’S TRUTH: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II: Acclaimed writer David Chrisinger discusses his new book.

“Ernie Pyle was the poet laureate of World War II, the most widely read and revered correspondent of the greatest conflict in human history. Finally, at long last, David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth does full justice to Pyle, beautifully recounting his life while retracing his footsteps across battlefields. This is a magnificent narrative and a magisterial narrative—the best World War II book of 2023.”

— Journalist, author, Alex Kershaw

At the height of his fame and influence during World War II, Ernie Pyle’s nationally syndicated dispatches from combat zones shaped America’s understanding of what the war felt like to ordinary soldiers, as no writer’s work has before or since. From North Africa to Sicily, from the beaches of Anzio to the beaches of Normandy, and on to the war in the Pacific, where he would meet his end, Pyle had a genius for connecting with the full gamut of emotions his beloved dog faced grunts were feeling.

THE SOLDIER’S TRUTH: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II by acclaimed writer David Chrisinger brings Pyle’s journey to vivid life in all its heroism and pathos. Chrisinger presents a definitive biography of Pyle, drawing on unprecedented access to the writer’s personal correspondence. A humble man, himself plagued by melancholy and tortured by marriage to a partner whose mental health struggles were much more acute than his own, Pyle was in touch with suffering in a way that left an indelible mark on his readers. While never defeatist, his stories left no doubt as to the heavy weight of the burden soldiers carried. He wrote about post-traumatic stress long before that was a diagnosis. Chrisinger’s book captures every dramatic turn of Pyle’s war with sensory immediacy and a powerful feel for both the outer and the inner landscape.

With a background in helping veterans and other survivors of trauma come to terms with their experiences through storytelling, Chrisinger brings enormous reservoirs of empathy and insight to bear on Pyle’s experiences. Woven in and out of his chronicle is the golden thread of his own travels across these same landscapes, many of them still battle-scarred, searching for the landmarks Pyle wrote about. A moving tribute to an ordinary American hero whose impact on the Second World War is still too little understood, and a powerful account of that war’s impact and how it is remembered, THE SOLDIER’S TRUTH takes its place among the essential contributions to our understanding of war and how we make sense of it.