Nothing But Courage

Nothing But Courage by James Donovan

I have to evaluate this book vis-à-vis another much more famous book that I also read this year: Band of Brothers.

Where Band of Brothers follows the 101st Airborne on their march across Europe, Nothing But Courage follows the oft forgotten 82nd Airborne from Italy through their heroic actions on D-Day where they held the key bridges to the west of Utah Beach.

As a writer, I love reading historical nonfiction where if you wrote the same stories verbatim but present it as fiction, an editor would reject them outright for being “unbelievable”.

This is 373 pages of unbelievable bravery. It’s visceral, well paced, and engaging throughout.

Most importantly though, this book is sincere. In reading Band of Brothers, I was struck by how uhh overt some of the propaganda Ambrose wrote in was. I understand it was a product of the end of the Cold War, a time when we were looking for heroes. It’s not that it’s a bad book, quite the contrary I would applaud Ambrose for the hours upon hours of first-hand interviews and testimony that is sadly no longer possible, but it doesn’t paint a full picture. It lacks context.

Nothing But Courage is riddled with nuance and context. It’s admittedly difficult and unsettling to read accounts from the men fighting on the Axis side, but Donovan interjects them masterfully to answer a very important thematic question: when two men across a foxhole from each other are down to their last bullet, what makes one fight on while the other surrenders? And you know what? When you frame it that way, it makes the tales of harrowing heroism by men thousands and thousands of miles from their homes fighting to the last bullet more powerful than any bit of overt propaganda can.

I’ll admit my own shortcomings, part of my enjoyment of this book comes from walking through this battlefield–it was our wonderful tour guide Eric who recommended it. Standing in the foxholes that are still there definitely painted the picture in my mind, but even still this would be a squarely top 5 book of this year for me. Otherwise, some of the prose is a little lacking, but in the inverse of the above, that is fueled by my own firsthand experience.

How this hasn’t been made into a movie yet, I will never understand.

If you’ll grant me a moment of self promotion, I wrote a story about this very event that received a Runner-up award. Give it a read for a taste of what you’d get reading Nothing But Courage: Across The Merderet

Final Grade (all out of ten):

Plot: 8

Characters: 8

Conflict: 9

Theme: 9

Setting: 6

Prose: 6

Tone: 8

Quality: 9

Impact: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Overall: 83/100

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A/N:

Over the next ten days I’ll be releasing full reviews of my top ten books of 2025. From there, I plan on publishing a weekly book review. I’m hoping this is a way to keep me reading regularly and academically.

A quick note on my grading philosophy which I formed listening to a few movie critics. I believe that a 7 in any of the categories above constitutes “Good”. Anything above that is something that is above and beyond in any one particular category. I believe this creates a more nuanced evaluation of any Story. Very, very rarely do I give scores above 90 (8 since I started grading books back in 2022). Consider anything a 70 or above the equivalent of 5 stars. You may note that some entries are tied. The tiebreakers are the higher individual score in Enjoyment, then Impact, then Quality, then back up to Plot and descending from there.

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