Here’s a small homage to a category G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell popularized: the good bad book—basically, hokey but appealing. I propose classing certain other books as good good. They are both viscerally enjoyable and deeply serious, like an old-fashioned Sunday dinner with a roast and succotash and homemade wild blackberry pie and theological discussion, preliminary to a long, fierce, wily game of kick-the-can.
Alas, there don’t seem to be many books from recent decades that qualify, but I’ve made a few discoveries in recent years. One that my husband, Tom, cherishes in honor of his late father, a Navy officer in both World War II and the Korean War, is Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning An Army at Dawn (Picador, 2002), about the Allied North Africa campaign in 1942 and 1943, beginning with the invasion named Operation Torch.
Atkinson’s is a truly winning account. He has a rare lust for the bare-naked truth with all of her cellulite, and he doesn’t care how much archival labor it takes to court her; most astonishingly, the courtship maintains an unbroken lyricism. The distinctly green hue of the American troops (some of them naively open poltroons, some with a gee-whiz enthusiasm for combat); our generals’ earnest bumbling in some cases and egomaniacal eccentricity in others; the patient contempt of British confederates, and our leadership’s slowness in accepting their good advice to invade Europe from the south first, through Italy,
