PRESS RELEASE FROM RANDOM HOUSE


You will all be aware of BAND OF BROTHERS, the incredible TOM HANKS and STEVEN SPIELBERG World War 2 series, in many people’s opinion some of the greatest television ever made. After debuting on Sky, the series became a huge cult DVD box-set hit and the original book by Steven Ambrose, has gone on to sell 396,000 copies in paperback in the UK alone.
Now, some really exciting news. HANKS and SPIELBERG are working together again, and this time have been joined by GEORGE PELICANOS (The Wire) to create a ‘companion piece’ to BAND OF BROTHERS. Instead of being set in mainland Europe in WW2, the new series, THE PACIFIC looks to the Far East, and the fierce jungle fighting against the Imperial Japanese Empire.

This is an HBO production, and you will know that they are the greatest TV drama producers in the world, having created classics such as THE WIRE and THE SOPRANOS. The budget for THE PACIFIC is a staggering $200m.
In the UK, SKY has acquired the series and will be showing it on SKY MOVIES without commercial breaks from March 2010. SKY say they will continue to air the series indefinitely throughout their rights period.

Guardian article about the acquisition: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/21/the-pacific-hbo-sky-band-of-brothers
Sky announcement: http://movies.sky.com/band-of-brothers-ii-comes-to-sky-movies
And you can watch the trailer, here: http://www.hbo.com/events/pacific/video.html


THE BOOKS (Ebury Press)
The TV series is based on two original memoirs, and we have just acquired BOTH of them. We will publish them with taglines, flashes and quotes (from HANKS etc) clearly linking them to the series.
WITH THE OLD BREED
By E. B. Sledge
4 March 2010, £12.99 tpb
First published in 1981, this memoir exchanges heroics and machismo for the perspective of an intelligent, scared but duty-bound teenager who survived some of the most savage fighting the U.S. Marines have ever faced. Sledge reminds us that within every soldier, the real struggle on the battlefield is the constant temptation to lose one's humanity, a state of affairs he witnessed far too often.
E. B. "Sledgehammer" Sledge was born and grew up in Mobile, Alabama. In late 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, and was then sent to the Pacific where he fought at Peleliu and Okinawa -- some of the fiercest and filthiest battles of WWII. After the war, Sledge joined the biology faculty of Alabama College (later University of Montevallo), where he taught until his retirement. Sledge died on March 3rd, 2001.
"Of all the books about the ground war in the Pacific, [With the Old Breed] is the closest to a masterpiece."
--The New York Review of Books

HELMET FOR MY PILLOW
A Young Marine's Stirring Account of Combat in World War II
By Robert Leckie
6 May 2010, tpb, £12.99

First published in 1957, this is a vivid first-hand account of combat and survival in World War II. From boot camp in Parris Island to the bloody war in the Pacific, author (and private) Robert Leckie experienced it all: the booze, the brawling, and the loving on a sixty-two-hour liberty; the courageous fighting and dying in combat as the Marines slugged it out, inch by inch, island by island across the Pacific to the shores of Japan.
Robert Leckie was born on December 18, 1920 in Philadelphia. After enlisting in the United States Marine Corps shorlty after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he worked in the 1st Marine Division as a machine gunner and as an intelligence scout during the Battle of Guadalcanal. He was later awarded the Purple Heart. Helmet for My Pillow received the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Annual Award in 1957. He died in December of 2001.
"A powerful book that pulls no punches."
--New York Times Book Review