Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton's Third Army and desperate for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his commanders'. In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through carnage and chaos, the likes of which Dubin could never have imagined.
In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.
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AudiobooksNow review by Dustine on 2010-03-25 23:31:42
Some reviewers have debated who would win a Grisham/Turow kick off. Another History Channel buff sounds as though he weighed the story line and found it wanting in the chronology and facts departments. Not to dispute these reviewers in their fields of expertise, won't even go there. But a couple of them may have missed the entire reason it was written.
I like this story because it is so very entertaining. I could hardly wait to listen to the next disc because I was wondering, given the known outcome from the beginning of the book, how would it ever arrive by the end? I empathized with this Everyman who wanted to experience combat, and once there, only hoped to be warm just once more before he died.
Along the way to Bastogne he meets a man and a woman intrinsic to the story, They kept me guessing to the very end!
Ordinary Heroes will stay with me for a long time. When the last disc ended I understood why Turow chose the title. To have called it Extraordinary Heroes may have given too much away.
