 | 1. | Smith, Godfrey, ed. (E.S. Turner, Gavin Ewart, Michael Green, Henry Reed, Diana Gardner, John Austin, Harold Nicolson, J.B. Priestley, John Pudney, Pierre Clostermann, Edward Murrow, Randall Jarrell, Jean Paul Sartre, Stephen Spender, Alan Ross, et al.) HOW IT WAS IN THE WAR. AN ANTHOLOGY.
Pavilion, (London, 1989).
317 pp, large 8vo (9 7/16" H), hard cover in dust jacket. B&w illustrations. ISBN 1851453636 "Drawing together the contrasting testimony of numerous writers and participants (in WWII) - poets and generals, sailors and firefighters, paratroopers and land girls, fighter pilots and factory workers - Godfrey Smith has assembled a unique collage of war experience...There are graphic accounts from every theatre of war, while the great actions such as Dunkirk, the Blitz, the convoys, the Battle of Britain, the Desert War and the invasion of Europe are described from several perspectives, with varying degrees of immediacy or hindsight. Some of the contributions are by writers who wrote little else - or were killed before they could. We find Ludovic Kennedy writing on the last moments of HMS Hood; Robert Kee on life in a German PoW camp; Vernon Scannell on desertion from a North African battlefield; Hugh Trevor-Roper on the suicide of Hitler; Alan Moorehead on the gruesome discoveries at Belsen; John Hersey on the 'noiseless flash' of Hiroshima; and epic events are narrated by Max Hastings, Noel Barber and Cornelius Ryan. There are poems by Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, John Pudney and Alan Ross, Gavin Ewart and Stevie Smith, and many others, including an anonymous 8th Army soldier, whose touching prayer for courage, written on a scrap of paper, was found fluttering in the desert wind. Equally diverse reports and impressions from the home front complete this unique record, reaffirming the view of those highly charged years that if Britain was never in greater danger, she was never more vibrantly alive." Very light wrinkling at top/bottom of spine, slight waviness to fore-edge of textblock. Dust jacket has light edge wrinkling, light browning along top edge, two tiny tears. VG+/VG
Price: 15.00 USD |
