Tom Hanks deserves our admiration, but is he really our "chronicler in chief" [March 15]? I've been reading World War II history for more than 50 years, and when I read that Hanks thinks the writing of academic historians is "often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel," I flashed on the works of Rick Atkinson, Richard Bessel, Martin Gilbert, Richard Overy and a hundred other academic historians who have made the war real, capturing both its grand scale and its smallest details.
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