Customer Reviews

V for Victory: America's Home Front During World War II

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We are writing a journal of the "Old Days" for our children and grandchildren. We needed our memory refreshed on WWII rationing and other patriotic actions. Stan Cohen had compiled just what we needed. (Note: Amazing how "politically incorrect" we were in those days!!!)

This is an absolutely great book! For those of us who had the incomparable experience of living in WWII wartime America, each page of this remarkable book will cause a jolt.

It's all there...with no punches pulled. The Government propaganda machine cranked out media that was aimed at having us hate our Axis enemies. (The same Germany, Italy and Japan that are our friends today.) Yes, the great photos and text cover it all....air raid drills and shelters, Victory Gardens, rationing, civil defense, draft boards, relocation of Japanese, the war plants and manpower. It was a time that the equal opportunity movements for women, African-Americans and the handicapped started to gain steam.

World War II brought us out of the Depression, and author Stan Cohen depicts how a sleeping America became an unmatched industrial machine because determination of its WWII work force. Nor does he neglect technologies that were developed in the home front. The computer, television and a multitude of other products were invented or advanced during this period.

V for Victory has 408 pages. Each page is remarkable.

I recommend this book highly.

Martin Davis, Ph.D.

The major fault with this book is its complete lack of editorial judgement. With hundreds of photos and graphic material it should have been presented in a much more imaginative way to make the pages sparkle. The presentation is completely unprofessional which is annoying because with so much wonderful visual material this should have looked a wonderful book.

However I did find it a fascinating visual record of the war years but exasperating at times because of the overwhelming repetition of photos. Do I really need to look at over fifty photos of scrap drives? I just wonder, looking through the pages, if they had any photos they didn't use. The text is basically captions and some longer essays and there really should have been an index, this is the sort of book readers dip into and refer back to.

As well as the photos there is plenty of printed ephemera and these items intrigued me most. For example the chapter on Food for Victory has a seed packet, recipe books, posters, a cover to a home canning book, a lunch bag, a packet of waxed paper, the front of a newspaper produced by Kraft cheese, a Victory garden book. Seeing these printed items reminded me of Numark and Jacob's stunning America's Wartime Scrapbook - Pearl Harbour to V-J . A large format book with 1500 printed items arranged in themed spreads, all in color, too.

Both books, visually, approach the war years in a different style. I love Numark and Jacob's scrapbook format and if only Cohen's book hadn't been so amateurish editorially it could well have become a standard photo book on the period.


***LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

This is a book that every Rosie the Riveter or decendant thereof should own. How easy it is to imagine life during WWII when immersed in the photo library and artifact archive Stan Cohen presents! The author clearly demonstrates a single-minded labor of love to preserve the overall personal story of this critical and singular period in American history. Another Amazon review complained about the somewhat unprofessional presentation of the materials in the book but this is exactly why I love it. It's like the very scrapbooks that the WWII generation used to put together - photos, matchbooks, dance cards, postcards, badges, sheetmusic, unusual war front news stories, posters, etc. The materials are organized in either topical or chronological chapters and thoroughly annotated. It's like finding the nation's wartime history in old box in the attic. The compendium brings history to life through the extraordinariness of the everyday objects and photos of homefront life.

I just brought this book home from a used book store. It is indeed a great book. It purports to be a graphic image of World War II. This is wrong. It is MUCH MORE than a graphic record. The text is also uniformly good. I am a serious WWII student (at least buff, see my other reviews) and this book includes much information that is not commonly known or appreciated. Did you know that the YMCA operated over 500 mobile kitchens in England? They were called Tea Cars because that is mostly what they delivered. I know a lot about American Red Cross Clubmobiles (see reviews on this subject), but I had NEVER HEARD of the tea cars. Now I am on a hunt for information on them. I did not know where Japanese diplomats were interned before they were sent home--I do now. There is more, much more. I love this book. I think that you will too. Furthermore, the publisher does not seem to have any more and it probably did not sell in huge quantities, so the used copies will likely dry up so get your copy now. I am buying a second copy.

Aside from the stories my parents told me, this book is probably the closest I'll ever get to experiencing life in America during the early 1940's.
It's all here: the music, newspaper headlines, letters home, children's toys, wartime propaganda (including a "Jap Primer"!), rationing, fashions, transportation, movies, and loads and loads of photographs! I also like the fact that it begins with those years before the United States' involvement in the war, and the public's reactions and opinions of the European carnage pre-December 7th, 1941.
This is not a disjointed collection of words and pictures thrown together incohesively, but a book that re-creates in all its *glory* the lives and times of our parents and grandparents written by one who was there.
During dinnertime on many occasions my mother will tell my children vignettes of her youth during the war, how she and her friends used to collect scraps of metal and rubber, how they would save the grease from meat, of watching the latest war news during movie previews at the show, and of seeing the local boys off to fight in a far off land. And everything she would say is right here in even greater detail in this 'encyclopedia' of the World War II homefront.
It's this sort of a book that is needed to be in our educational system - not the politically correct pap written by opinionated saps being shoved down our children's throats today. THIS is how it was.
A truly awesome book.