The Booklist: After the War
The act of War has affected hundreds of millions of people in so many different ways over the centuries. These memories should never be allowed to be forgotten. Bookhugger’s publishers present some of the most haunting fiction and non-fiction you will ever read…
Those Who Marched Away, by Alan Taylor, Irene Taylor (eds)
War infects everything it touches. For everyone, whether combatant or not, it is the most testing of times, when the old certainties and moral imperatives cannot be guaranteed. Life hangs by a gossamer thread and many people who would otherwise not keep diaries are moved to record what they see, feel and do.
Arranged as a diary around a calendar year, Those Who Marched Away tells many individual stories from many wars down the ages, with several compelling entries for each day of the year. The diarists come from every walk of life; from faceless foot-soldiers to those charged with orchestrating battle, from the Home Front to the Holocaust, from famous writers, political leaders and fighting men and women to ordinary working people enveloped by events over which they have little influence. Together, they contribute an intimate insight into what has been described both as ‘the most exciting and dramatic thing in life’ to ‘the universal perversion’.
Read an extract here.
Love and Freedom, by Rosemary Kavan
This is a brave book that deserves to better known. Rosemary Kavan, an Englishwoman who was married to a Czech, unforgettably portrays life in post-war Prague, from the early optimistic years, through the nightmare of the Stalinist purges up to false Prague Spring of 1968 and its aftermath.
Her husband, Pavel, a devoted Communist, was a victim of the show-trials of the early 1950s. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in 1960 soon after his release. Branded a traitor’s wife, Rosemary Kavan struggled to support herself and her two sons. She worked as a translator, a drill operator in a factory, and a tracer of blue-prints for the state railways.
In the mid-1960s she became involved in the student reform movement, but the Russian invasion of 1968 drove both her sons into exile and finally she herself was forced to escape to England.
Day After Night, by Anita Diamant
Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.
Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz.
Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.
The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam
A Russian woman named Lara arrives at the house of Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman and widower living in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. It is possible that Marcus’s daughter, Zameen, may have known Lara’s brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously.
But like Marcus’s wife, Zameen is dead; a victim of the age in which she was born.
In the days that follow, further people will arrive at the house: David Town and James Palantine, two Americans who have spent much of their adult lives in the area, for their respective reasons; Dunia, a young Afghan teacher; and Casa, a radicalised young man intent on his own path.
The stories and histories that unfold – interweaving and overlapping, and spanning nearly a quarter of a century – tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan.
Stranger in the House, by Julie Summers
Over 4 million ex-service men were demobilised between 1945 and 1947. These men, changed by injury or experience, returned to a Britain that had also adjusted in their absence. In Stranger in the House, Julie Summers talks to the women who were left to cope at home without their menfolk and explains how the longed-for homecomings were sometimes difficult for all concerned. With the majority of young men away fighting, wives, daughters and mothers maintained the home front by going out to work, running the household, looking after the family and becoming the main breadwinner.
Of course most of these women looked forward for the safe return of their men, but often did not realise that they themselves had been changed by their own time coping alone.When the war was over there were many wives who had to deal with an injured, emotionally-damaged husband, children who had never seen their father before, mothers whose sons did not want to speak about their horrific experiences and those who thought their fiancés were dead only to find them reappearing after they had married another.
Julie Summers has spent hours speaking to the women involved and listening to their often sad, sometimes joyous, stories. Families were long affected by the fall-out of the war’s survivors, from depression to alcoholism to marital disharmony and divorce and many have spoken here for the first time about those challenges. An enlightening, fascinating insight into a little-known aspect of our recent history, Stranger in the House is a moving and honest look at how ordinary women’s private lives were altered forever.
The Year That Changed the World, by Michael Meyer
‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees.
Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change.
More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century but also a crucial refutation of American mythology and a misunderstanding of history that was deliberately employed to lead the United States into some of the intractable conflicts it faces today.
The Monopoly of Violence, by James Sheehan
In 1899 an International Peace Conference convened in The Hague. The representatives of the world’s most militarised states, for whom the ability to wage war was absolutely central to their prestige, came together to debate the possibility of disarmament, the banning of certain weapons and the crafting of rules of war. History has not been kind to that conference: within twenty years, Europe and much of the rest of the world was drowned in blood by those same powers for whom ‘the monopoly of violence’ was so crucial. And less than twenty years after the First World War ended, an even more savage war without limits of any kind took the lives of fifty million people.
Yet since 1945, the European states which had glamourised their military elites, and made going to war the highest expression of patriotism, have renounced violence as a way of settling their disputes. War is now unthinkable, from Dublin to the edge of the Balkans. Violence has been eclipsed as a tool of statesmen.
This astonishing reversal is the subject of James Sheehan’s masterly book. It is nothing less than the story of war and peace in twentieth-century Europe, and how the first came to be dominated by the second. European states are now shaped by ‘civilian’ values and institutions. Politicians are measured on their ability to deliver well being and prosperity, not on their capacity to lead nations in war. To citizens of the major European countries in the first half of the century, this would have seemed an incredible, almost utopian prospect.
But Sheehan’s book is also a timely reminder of the differences between Europe and America, at a time when the USA is asserting its right and duty to make war for ideological or self-interested ends. And how Europeans will live in this dangerous, violent world is a question that becomes ever more urgent as the chaos in the Middle East affects the stability of societies with open frontiers and liberal traditions. Will Europe as a whole learn to use some form of military power to defend its own interests, when necessary? Or will it remain in thrall to a USA whose armed might it both respects and fears?
