War and Remembrance, by Herman Wouk
By Peter on Feb 2, 2010 in Excellent book, Fiction Books, Herman Wouk, Historical Fiction, World literature, bestseller, book review
The Winds of War (1971) told the story of the extended family of Captain Victor “Pug” Henry up to and including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The very compelling tale of the Henry family, a North American family drawn into the very center of the war maelstrom, is a clever device for telling the story of World War II. The books capture the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War better than any of books I know of.
Herman Wouk is an exceptional writer. Wouk’s characters are real men and women – not larger than life as we find them in many historical novels. They live, breath and sometimes die.
Wouk manages to cover virtually every aspect of the struggle for world dominance that World War Two was. We follow Victor “Pug” Henry, a stoic Navy captain; his duty-bound son Warren, a Navy flyer in the Pacific; his formerly wayward son Byron, a submarine officer who marries the Jewish woman Natalie Jastrow in Europe. And we follow the Jewish Jastrow family and see – perhaps experience is a better word – the hardships of Jews in Europe, as well as the Holocaust – with their eyes. And using a fictional memoir of an imprisoned German officer, Wouk also lets us see the war from the German perspective.
Some of the reading is very chilling. Wouk’s stunning descriptions of Auschwitz and the “relocation plans” for Jews throughout Europe are the most realistic and engrossing descriptions of the Holocaust I have ever encountered.
The book is long and huge. Over one thousand dense pages. But I have rarely read a historical tale so moving, gripping and engrossing. At the same time it is very educational – I thought I knew a lot about the war but War and Remembrance told me how little I knew. And what a way to learn history! In a great, exceptionally well written and exciting book like this.
I am glad these books were recommended to me. The are both rare gems. Perhaps War and Remembrance even more so than The Winds of War. They are based on exceptional historical research, have finely developed characters and intriguing subplots – all wrapped in a compelling language and told with great compassion by a master story teller. A very, very satisfying read, and one which touched me deeply.
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