From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

Molly Guptill Manning

Start date: January 15, 2015

Finish date: January 16, 2015

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Why we're reading this: A book about books during WW2
[close] A book about books during WW2

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By Book Riot · 1 post · 5297 views

last updated Dec 16, 2014 09:22AM

Free copy of Proximity Factor this July, no reviews required. Just enjoy.
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What Members Thought

May 26, 2015 Shelley rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, 2015

3.5? To counterbalance Germany's anti-intellectualism and intense propaganda, thousands of books were given to WW2 servicemen overseas, to comfort, educate and relax them in between battle. This is the most fascinating story, and I can't believe that in all of my years of reading about WW2, I only ran into the barest snippets of this story. (I'd read about servicement who wrote to Betty Smith, telling what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn had meant to them overseas, but had not known the extent of the p ...more

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Nov 14, 2014 Denise rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: archives-libraries-information, netgalley

I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book on Netgalley.

This is a story-style history book, and it tells the story of the military library program in WWII. There had previously been a mass library program in WWI, which was driven by donations and run by civilian volunteer librarians, and which had fallen into neglect in the interwar period, the books of its program largely dispersed to non-military libraries. So this book traces the revival of the librarian-run civilian donation program Vi I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book on Netgalley.

This is a story-style history book, and it tells the story of the military library program in WWII. There had previously been a mass library program in WWI, which was driven by donations and run by civilian volunteer librarians, and which had fallen into neglect in the interwar period, the books of its program largely dispersed to non-military libraries. So this book traces the revival of the librarian-run civilian donation program Victory Book Campaign, and then the switch-over from using donated books for soldiers (which really sucked in terms of book quality) to the military mass-ordering special edition cheap paperbacks directly for the servicemen.

The book talks at length about what value the new-ish format of paperbacks had - their low weight made them easier to hold when you were on your back in a hospital bed, easier to be stuffed into your kit on patrol and carried around for miles, ideal to be passed around (or even broken up into chapters to share, as we all know from that one episode of M*A*S*H). There’s a very neat little story here, drawing out both the value of pleasure reading in relieving stress, as well as how the success of mass distribution paperbacks to servicemen finally got publishers to stop hugging the hardback and embrace the glory of pulp for the masses, as well as how releasing serious literature into the wild made a lot of men read them who likely would not otherwise.

My criticism would be that the book tends towards the saccharine, and relies on a large amount of anecdotes in letters from soldiers which are stretched into generalities for how "the men" in general felt about reading and the program. The book contains many passages that are pretty openly trying to stir up your emotions about the glory of reading for humanity (there is a passage about how men propped themselves up and read as they waited to die of their injuries during the Invasion of Normandy which made me have to put the book down and do something else for a while), so the book has A Message aside from just telling history, and it’s a very nice message, but it does get in the way of the history.

But overall a nice read, giving a fresh slice of history for a forgotten facet of WWII, the war you thought had already been completely written about! ...more

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