As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story [Paperback]

Emma Sweeney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2003

A touching, true love story that captures the spirit of a generation and a love that endures, as a daughter learns about her lost father through the love letters he wrote her mother while at war.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the end of WWII, a 26-year-old navy pilot meets and falls in love with a beautiful California girl named Beebe. They have about two weeks together before he is shipped off to the South Pacific for six months. When he returns they marry, have four sons and 10 good years together before he, still in the military, is killed in a plane crash off Bermuda in 1956. At the time of his death, his wife was pregnant with a daughter. The daughter spends her life longing for information about the father she never knew. Years later, after her mother's death, the daughter finds a bundle of letters that her father wrote to her mother in the six months before their marriage. Those letters are presented along with a foreword and afterword by the daughter, Sweeney, now a New York literary agent and gardening book author. The letters portray a decent, kindhearted young man with a quirky sense of humor who is obviously in love. Aside from a few colloquialisms of the 1940s, they could have been written by any lovesick military man in history. They are often corny, sometimes boring (as they only partially open doors into the psyches driving this old-fashioned romantic correspondence) and never erotic (not even suggestive unless "Greetings, my scandalous Scandinavian" counts). While these letters are obviously very precious to the woman who discovered them, they don't offer much character development or anything unique. (Apr. 10)Forecast: While war correspondence is a crowded subgenre, this attractively packaged little book (5" 7") has a blurb from War Letters editor Andrew Carroll and a planned tour that includes a stop at Annapolis. With more than 1.5 million members of the U.S. Armed Forces, it has a ready audience alert to the perils of separation, along with many more sympathetic to that predicament.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This engaging compilation of love letters written in the early months of 1946 by a young navy pilot named Jack Sweeney can only be described as a sweet love story that captures the personality of an intelligent and fun-loving man. Emma Sweeney, an author and literary agent, has compiled these letters as an homage to the father she never knew (Jack was killed on duty in an airplane crash in 1956, leaving four sons and his unborn daughter). The preface and afterword are a heartfelt explanation of both her need to know her father and the results of her research. Unfortunately, the book does not hold as much in the way of historical value as such works as Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front and Miss You: The World War II Letters of Barbara Wooddall Taylor and Charles E. Taylor. Additionally, Emma's mother's letters do not survive to give us a fuller picture of this courtship. However, the memoir is charming and would be a welcome addition to larger public libraries or libraries with a large collection of wartime correspondence. Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1st edition (April 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316738719
• ISBN-13: 978-0316738712
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,947,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book I Have Ever Read, May 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story (Hardcover)

This book is awesome!!! Jack is the most amazing man you will ever meet, even if it is only through his letters and his daughter's words. His letters were romantic, moving, funny, and inspiring. Every woman should read this book if for no other reason that to see an example of how she deserves to be treated and loved. This book is absolute perfection.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a simple story that packs a complex wallop, July 12, 2006

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story (Paperback)

Sometimes I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I'd like to meet. With only one plot, so I don't have to remember who's who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive.

Not an easy book to find.

So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short --- 179-page --- book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew.

The 45 letters tell of Jack's courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii.

What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child --- Emma.

It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died --- and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation.

These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I've never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn't I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that's happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe's letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of these letters --- you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy.

Within five months, he's closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe --- people who believe that when two people are married, they're the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn't laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did.

The letters pile up, then stop abruptly --- for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack's return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956 when he died.

Emma reads through the letters, and does some digging, and finds out one fact that her mother had never revealed to her. It will make you cry --- sudden, hot, brief tears. And you'll cry again when you read Jack's "last letter", written just a few days before his death. Which is just as it should be. A love story with a sad ending, and then a new chapter with a little girl....that's classic material.

I read such stylish, sophisticated, brilliant books. I stretch to understand them, to be worthy of them. And here is this slim volume, so simple, so tender. The point couldn't be more obvious. And yet it too is a stretch. Maybe a bigger one. Maybe a much bigger one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Did you ever see a dream walking?, May 16, 2006

By 

M. A. Bechaz "bookaholic" (Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story (Paperback)

Did you ever wish you could meet the perfect man, the kind of man who has a sense of humour, who is intelligent, who talks about his feelings, and who writes you the kind of love letters that not only make you feel gooier than a marshmallow but also restore your faith in all mankind? Well, Jack IS that man! As I read his letters, I couldn't help but fall wholeheartedly in love with him. In fact, I don't think any woman could read this and not fall in love with Jack. He's even dreamier than a year's worth of the R.E.M. stage of sleep.

Jack should have been a writer, if only he'd lived long enough. He had the gift of the gab in spades. His letters, written off the cuff, are better than the writing you find in books that writers have spent years refining and rewriting.

But most of all, Jack is a true romantic. Seriously, I think this is about the best love story I have ever read. If you have a soft spot in your heart for true romance, if you like nothing more than a love story, then all I can say is READ THIS BOOK! And the best thing about it is, Jack's not fictitious. He really lived. Knowing that there really are men like this in the world, who aren't just invented by some writer of fiction, will really gladden your heart, just as it did mine.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is definitely in my list of top ten books of all time.