Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

Overview

In this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he—by playing dead—was the only one to survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385496032
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/15/1999
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.92(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Robert Kotlowitz (1924-2012) a native of Baltimore and a graduate of Johns Hopkins, worked as Managing Editor of Harper's magazine and for more than two decades as Director of Programming and Broadcasting for WNET in New York.

Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the Best Voices of the Century as well as a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him Audiobook Narrator of the Year.

Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

Novelist Kotlowitz acts as his fallen buddies' unofficial company historian of their combat duty in WW II, from army basic training to a precipitous, disastrous encounter with the enemy.

More than 50 years after WW II, with over half its veterans now dead, Kotlowitz (His Master's Voice, 1992, etc.) recounts his own experiences, in part to find "a definitive end to the accumulated weight of sadness and nostalgia." With this simple goal, his straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier's life, as well as his own teenager's naïveté. After getting bucked out of a training program in order to supply his division with live bodies after D-day, Kotlowitz is thrown into an eclectic mix of soldiers in the so-called "Yankee Division." His commanding officer is a textbook-trained OCS graduate and former university football tackle from Ohio, his squad leader a generally reliable soldier with a tendency to go AWOL under pressure, and his buddies a melting-pot mix of draftees. Infantry life quickly sorts them into a soldiers' hierarchy, right down to the squad's sad sack, but Kotlowitz gives each man his balanced due. After an uneventful delay awaiting deployment orders in France, he and his buddies find themselves on the front, dug in a few hundred yards from the well-prepared Germans, in the fall of 1944. When they are finally sent forward, the assault is so disastrous that he survives only by "playing the living corpse" among his platoon, one of just three survivors. After subjecting him to grilling by the division's historian and its psychiatrist, the army, ironically, sends him behind lines to recuperate by guarding a warehouse of duffel bags, some of which belonged to his fallen buddies.

An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war—the kind that history overlooks.

Kirkus Reviews

His straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier’s life, as well as his own teenager’s naivete…An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war—the kind that history overlooks.”

Kirkus Reviews

This memoir does a superb job of sympathizing with all those puzzled boys, dead well before their time.”

Washington Post Book World

Combat soldiers’ memories are like flames or waves on a beach; they seem the same, but their patterns are always changing. Robert Kotlowitz…has produced…the model for such memories…[A] superb narrative.”

New York Times Book Review

Kotlowitz writes with skill and mordant humor of the infantryman’s life, of the incredible instinct to survive, of ‘the sounds…never before heard’… His fine memoir belongs on readers’ shelves alongside such books as Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle, primary documents of a terrible time.”

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