His publishers reprinted 325,000 copies of
Citizen Soldiers, as well as 40,000 copies of his earlier
D-Day. Retiring from academia in 1995, Ambrose devoted even more time to his multi-volume coverage of the lives of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, laboring for nearly twenty years on the Eisenhower volumes and ten years on the Nixon volumes, both times with results that critics praised for their meticulous research and balance. According to
Book contributor Glenn Speer, Ambrose "established a cottage industry in American history."
A Wisconsin Youth
Ambrose grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin, a small town where Ambrose's father was the local doctor and which provided a Hollywoodized vision of middle America. "When I was in grade school World War II dominated my life," Ambrose wrote on his Web site. "My father was a navy doctor in the Pacific. My mother worked in a pea cannery beside German POWs (Afrika Korps troops captured in Tunisia in May 1943)." The historian recalled going with his two brothers to the movies several times a week as a kid: "ten cents six nights a week, twenty-five cents on Saturday night." They were not going to see the feature film, "but to see the newsreels which were almost exclusively about the fighting in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific.
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