Books: Hero Unashamed

THE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE: UNITY 1942-1944 (378 pp.)—Simon & Schusfer ($6).

Most of the great figures of World War II have now written their memoirs, and most of the books are touched with a let-bygones-be-bygones air that often puts the reader at one remove from reality. Not so The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. His love of country, his ego, his antipathies, his glory in victory stand from the page like freshly stirred passions. A decade and a half later, perhaps he alone of the surviving architects of victory could write without embarrassment a passage such as this:...

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