The Greatcoat Paperback – May 3, 2019

So glad this book was recommended to me. I love history stories with a personal side. This historical fiction is a page turner right from the first chapter. You can imagine what is happening by the excellent detailed descriptions. You are shocked throughout as the story weaves through families, time lines, places, there are highs and lows, joys and sorrows. In the end there is peace among those involved, you understand the significance of the Greatcoat and the effect it had on many. It makes me want to know more details about the real facts this story was based on. You really feel for all the characters and what they went through.

The Greatcoat is truly a well written, interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking story. While I was fully engrossed and thoroughly enjoyed the love and life stories of the individual characters, the book also helped me to sort out a piece of history (the Vietnam War) that remains a mystery to me today as it continues to give me much angst and confusion for fear that we are capable of repeating the same egregious mistakes all over again and again. It confirms my total frustration about the reasons we go to war, no matter they be based on “justifiable” motives or “incomprehensible” motives, that the horror and ravages of any war on humankind by humankind takes its devastating toll on every aspect of all of our lives.

The Great Coat is a sweet tale told with a degree of appealing innocence. The author makes sure you hear the dieing WWII prop plane, the troop carrier, the guttural sounds of desperate enemy combatants, the frantic cruel decisions that are war upon war upon war…and indeed the voice of a young man who gave up his coat and life, for a moment of respite. Almost accidentally, sneaking in with the humanity, the nostalgia of other personal and historic events brought me to my own life, thoughtful, and finally resolved, like the voyage of the Great Coat.

The Greatcoat is clearly authored by a historian, full of factual detail about the context surrounding historical events. D’Antonio links them together over generations through amazing twists of fate and manages to make the world feel so small, even while reminding us of the big universal values that bind family, friends, and even foes. As a Generation X reader, I finished with a greater appreciation for the world as it was, and the forces at play, just before I got there.

Who hasn't thought of collecting the stories told and retold throughout a family and passed down from one generation to the next. The Great Coat is historical fiction with possibly a bit more than a thread of biography woven through the pages with names changed to protect the innocent. An enjoyable read with surprising echos and reverberations into my own family's story and ultimately the universal human narrative. Set against a timeline of historical events that causes one to reflect on where they were and what they were doing at the same time as The Great Coat's characters who seem to exist in a world that is surprisingly as close as a few degrees of separation.

The Greatcoat reads like Louis L'Amour but carries the self-awareness and insight of an Evelyn Waugh novel - a great combination of page-turning curiosity and adventure with thoughtfulness and personal perspective. I hope the author has more stories to share in the future!

This is a beautifully written work of fiction, telling the stories of several members of a single family over several generations as they interact, overcome, and triumph in the face of history making world events. This is a very enjoyable, thought provoking, and (as other reviewers have mentioned) educational read. I look forward to more works by this amazing author.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Greatcoat and I highly recommend it! I was engaged from the first page through the last. The storytelling was very impressive and kept me wanting more! Well done!