Just Finished: Before Their Time

Just Finished: Before Their Time by Robert Kotlowitz. The memoir is from 1997 and Mr. Kotlowitz passed away in 2012. His NYT obituary is here.

An immensely touching, modest little gem, the book covers only the war years. From the NYT:

Among the last cohort drafted in World War II, Mr. Kotlowitz was part of an ill-fated American assault against German troops in France after D-Day, which he described in a 1995 article in The New York Times Magazine and in “Before Their Time: A Memoir,” published in 1999.

“In this engagement, which lasted 12 hours,” he wrote in The Times, “all but three men in the third platoon, Company C, 104th Regiment, were lost. I was one of the survivors.”

The writing is spare, human and I can not really do justice to the story. All I can say is that it was gripping and had me in tears.