Only ten days after finishing the first book that I’ve read for my own enjoyment, in four years, I get to sit here at my desk and type a review of another book. This book came as a gift from my mom… a particularly wonderful and meaningful gift. I’ve long since been a fan of American history or at least moments in time within our history, and WWII is certainly one of our history’s most compelling stories. Having grown up with my mom and my grandmother, I’ve been instilled with a sense of appreciating what has come before me and what has created the world I know. My grandmother’s generation, the accurately named “Greatest Generation”, paved what is no less than the road of the modern free world, and I am keenly aware and appreciative of the debt that the world owes her time.

This gift of a book, “Ernie Pyle’s War” taught me of a man who framed the war for newspaper readers back home, in a way that war correspondents could never have imagined. Ernie was a simple Midwesterner, raised in an unimaginably small town in Indiana. Funny, how heroes can come from the most innocuous of places.

How did a rather quiet boy, depressed in spirit, weary of soul, become an American hero, whose death was mourned on the same level of that of President Roosevelt?

He accomplished this by writing columns that were ‘letters back home” He brought the war into everyone’s kitchen not by writing of battles and commanders and romantic notions of patriotism and confrontation, but by delivering missives of almost poetic tone, about the boys… the everyday Americans, who are pinned down in foxholes, slogging through the mud of Northern Africa or quietly facing their terribly tenuous futures onboard landing ships bound for Sicily.

Ernie didn’t deliver the front page headlines… he could be found in columns from the warfront… from the repair depots, or from the slopes from the front line; artillery flying overhead, roads mined with death and destruction.

And Ernie was, like millions of Americans of the day, as unlikely a hero as you might hope to find. His was a tortured soul. Happiness evaded Ernie; such an irony considering the meaning and the purpose his reports carried. Fame and riches found Ernie but simple joy never would.

James Tobin paints the mural of Ernie’s career and life using, to a tremendous extent, Ernie’s own writings. It’s a funny thing to review a well written biography, because ultimately you wind up reviewing a man’s life, and Tobin authors this extraordinary human life in a manner that’s properly respectful moving, surprising, unlikely, and soulful.

This book has a great deal of meaning to me. I’ve learned a great deal about a great man, forged, if in a terrible sense, in great times… times that framed the life of my grandmother, a wholly great woman. This all comes to me in the pages of a solid, moving book, given to me by my mother; an act, itself, of great love.