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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The New Yorker Book of War Pieces,
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This review is from: The New Yorker Book of War Pieces: London, 1939 to Hiroshima, 1945 (Paperback)
The best book ever on all aspects of life during World War II, both civilian and military 1939 to Hiroshima 1945. Some pieces are short some are fairly lengthy. The work product of 22 New Yorker writer/reporters makes up this outstanding look at history. A MUST good read.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not the usual history of WW2,
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This review is from: The New Yorker Book of War Pieces: London, 1939 to Hiroshima, 1945 (Paperback)
A collection of fifty-some pieces that appeared in the New Yorker magazine over the course of the war, varying in length from two or three pages to over 50--most are about ten. The collection shows the history of the war at a different level than one usually reads: neither at the level of immediate news items (Pearl Harbor gets only passing mention, to give an event in the past a relative date) nor of global Directions of History, but more how the war is felt by people in between milestones. (The story of PT109 is there, although at this point young Lt. Kennedy is only "the ex-ambassador's son," not "JFK!". The part about his fear of barracuda going for his testicles wasn't in the story the way I learned it in grade school.)
Read as a whole, the book shows a clear arc in taking the war seriously and personally. The first pieces are set in the phoniest of the Phony War in London and Paris: it's war again, by jingo!, and everyone's carrying around their gas mask in its little cardboard box, and slanging the Bosches, and the ladies are forming committees. And then suddenly the BEF has evacuated Dunkirk, and the Germans are driving on Paris, and bombs are falling on London, and it's become like a real war. And next thing you know, America is in the war, and it's all become very *very* real. A similar arc is traced in terms of social level: the early letters from Paris and London are clearly written from, and for, an upper social/literary class, and one only hears the popular attitude to the war from one's servants or hotel porters; we get the story of a Polish refugee from the German invasion, but she's a princess. But once America's well and truly into the war, we're mixing with bomb assembly-line machinists and grunts who used to be busboys back home. The final piece is 55 agonizing pages following a half-dozen residents of Hiroshima through the day of August 6 in detail, and over the next several months in general; there is absolutely nothing left of the sophisticated, detached tone of the beginning. Most new and different: I am now totally in awe of the Fijians. They rock the war.
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