Five Came Back by Mark Harris

According to Mark Harris, Frank Capra once made Oscar nominees stand on the stage together before he announced the winner. The five film directors that Harris focuses on, John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra, are for once similarly pushed into the limelight in this particularly readable tome. 

All five joined the armed forces as officers during World War II, leapfrogging serving in the lower ranks, and delivered the conflict's most persuasive and revealing coverage. Harris seems to suggest that their naïvety about serving was part of what made their stories so compelling, and deftly marries together the politics and personalities that made their films so effective as propaganda. Two of the most striking examples are Ford's The Battle of Midway, which was groundbreaking in its realism (though he didn't accept the label of propaganda) and Steven's The Nazi Plan. The first, Time magazine said should be mandatory viewing for all Americans while the second was only for the judges at the Nuremberg Trials. [Sue Lawrenson]