D.K.R. Crosswell

Very dense and went to great pains to boost General Smith at Eisenhower's expense, but a good read for those wanting an "inside baseball" view of command and politics in the post-war world.

I was laboring through Beetle, The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith. by D.K.R. Crosswell, 2010. Five hundred pages into it and finally had enough and put it down. It is not that it was a bad book; I just didn't need to continue to wade through the excruciating details of every meeting, gathering, discussion, briefing, or planning session Smith was involved in, either as a member or that he might have heard about. The specter of hacking my way through another 500 pages was just more than I show more could bear. It would probably serve well as a source or research collection for a dissertation or similar work.

4/10 Will probably never finish it and will try to pawn it off onto some other rube. show less

Hard book to review. Wanted to like this book but it was not well written. This guy's story is fairly interesting and you can learn a lot about him and the state of the U.S. Army from this book. It was just not done very well.