Review of 'When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This was an intriguing book written by a popular historian that actually covers two distinct stories: how librarians, publishers, and writers on the home front coalesced into an organization dedicated to providing American soldiers with reading material and a complimentary story of how American soldiers received and cherished Armed Services Editions (ASEs) of popular and classic books in Europe and the Pacific. There is also another thread in this book about the various problems home front organizations overcame in their efforts to supply books to the front that ranged from poor material quality of printed softcover books, Congressional efforts to censor "political propaganda" from reaching soldiers, and the uneven quality of books received through donation drives (for example, the Victory Book Campaign received outdated textbooks from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century). Her evidence of soldiers' relationship to these books is wholly anecdotal—she browses through letters to various writers, …
This was an intriguing book written by a popular historian that actually covers two distinct stories: how librarians, publishers, and writers on the home front coalesced into an organization dedicated to providing American soldiers with reading material and a complimentary story of how American soldiers received and cherished Armed Services Editions (ASEs) of popular and classic books in Europe and the Pacific. There is also another thread in this book about the various problems home front organizations overcame in their efforts to supply books to the front that ranged from poor material quality of printed softcover books, Congressional efforts to censor "political propaganda" from reaching soldiers, and the uneven quality of books received through donation drives (for example, the Victory Book Campaign received outdated textbooks from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century). Her evidence of soldiers' relationship to these books is wholly anecdotal—she browses through letters to various writers, V-mail correspondence with family, journalistic accounts, and postwar memoir recollections of these books. She closes with an argument that the efforts to convert weighty hardbound books into a pliable, featherweight softcover for portability in the battlefield during World War II unleashed the era of modern Mass Market Paperbacks that made reading more affordable for many more Americans; she also correlates soldiers' penchant for reading during war with their eagerness to attend college and pursue advanced degrees, technical fields, and medical professions during the 1950s.
