All the Best Years

v, 342 pp. Young also write Rommel: The Desert Fox, the first biography of the WWII general. Illustrated with 24 pages of halftones. "The author of the best-seller Rommel: The Desert Fox tells his own story in an autobiography as well-conceived and amusing as any of recent months. Born into a ship-salvaging family in Victorian England, the author's childhood of travel to exotic lands, of school and idle days at pre-War Oxford is a delight to read. With World War I the pace changes. Descriptions of coming to manhood in trench warfare, of being wounded and writing the popular Hun Hunters, then of adjusting to a changed post-War world, fill the center chapters with color, tension, and strife. Later years of newspapering in South Africa and India, then of fighting, capture and internment in the North African campaign, tell the story of a rise to fame and journalistic success."