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The Somme: Book summary and reviews of The Somme by Sir Martin Gilbert

The Somme

Heroism and Horror in the First World War

by Sir Martin Gilbert

The Somme by Sir Martin Gilbert X
The Somme by Sir Martin Gilbert
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Book Summary

At 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, the first Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches along the Somme River in France and charged out into no-man’s-land toward the barbed wire and machine guns at the German front lines. By the end of this first day of the Allied attack, the British army alone would lose 20,000 men. In just 138 days, 310,000 men died.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"His superbly written, absorbing recreations of innumerable small life-and-death struggles makes the book a fitting commemoration of the tragedy." - PW
"A noteworthy historian offers what should be the definitive account." - Library Journal

This information about The Somme was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Sir Martin John Gilbert, CBE, PC, is Winston Churchill's official biographer, and a leading historian of the modern world. He was born October 25, 1936 in London, England, and died February 3, 2015.

Martin Gilbert is the author of eighty-eight books, among them the single-volume Churchill: A Life, his twin histories First World War and Second World War, a comprehensive History of Israel, and his three-volume work, A History of the Twentieth Century. (also published in a single, condensed volume). He is an Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, Michigan.

His book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (published in the United States as The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War) is a classic work on the subject.

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