Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This engaging history shows that civilian life can sometimes be as dramatic as combat. Journalist Goodall, author of A Question of Conscience, culls excerpts from letters and diaries of the period, fleshing them out with her own commentary. Her subjects cope with wartime shortages and rationing, the blitz and separation from loved ones as soldiers depart overseas and London?s children are evacuated to the safety of the countryside. They experienced an often surreal mixture of chaos, death and normality; people enjoyed both conviviality and sing-alongs in the bomb shelter and reveled in theater, nightlife, weddings and christenings while keeping an ear cocked for the air-raid siren. The book is mainly a story of women without men. Goodall explores their travails in maintaining a semblance of domesticity, pining for absent husbands and sweethearts, dreading the arrival of ominous telegrams and wondering how to explain embarrassingly timed pregnancies. These excerpts also describe the electrifying arrival of American GIs, whose ebullience (and free-spending habits) swept many a British lass off her feet. The recruitment of women into the war effort, and the consequent broadening of social horizons, is also a major theme, as when two prim, middle-class teashop proprietresses go to work as machinists in a munitions factory and are soon transformed into enthusiastic proletarians and trade-union militants. Their voices register plenty of British pluck and stiff upper lip??the very worst that can happen is death, which is probably better than life,? writes one woman to her fiance?but plenty of pathos comes through as well. B&W photos. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Goodall collected letters and diaries from ordinary people who survived food shortages, terror bombing during the Blitz of 1940-1941, and morale-crushing rocket warfare in 1944-1945. Recognizing the human costs of six years of deprivation, fear, and loneliness, she dedicates the book "to my mother, who lost her youth to World War II." The author most poignantly cites the thousands of wartime romances that burned brightly because of recognition by men departing for combat of their mortality, and the empathy of the women about to be left behind. When the war ended, sobriety replaced romance, but, then, promises had been made. The author relates a story of a woman who had become involved with a man who later became a Japanese prisoner. After not hearing of or from him for five years and having gone on with her life, he telephoned in 1945 and pleaded for her to meet and marry him. An excellent selection of black-and-white photos depicts the variety of experiences and sacrifices described.-Alan Gropman, National Defense University, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
