Soldier from the War Returning

by Childers, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780618773688
• ISBN10: 0618773681
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-13
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

One of our most enduring national myths surrounds the men and women who fought in the so-called "Good War." The Greatest Generation, we're told by Tom Brokaw and others, fought heroically, then returned to America happy, healthy and well-adjusted. They quickly and cheerfully went on with the business of rebuilding their lives. In this shocking and hauntingly beautiful book, historian Thomas Childers shatters that myth. He interweaves the intimate story of three families-including his own-with a decades' worth of research to paint an entirely new picture of the war's aftermath. Each of these men spent two years overseas, fought and survived the war, and returned home. But the war changed them unalterably, and as the years passed, it leached out in desperate, sometimes destructive ways. Novelistic in its telling and impeccably researched, "Soldier From the War Returning" is a stark reminder that the price of was is unimaginably high. The consequences are human, not just political, and the toll can stretch across generations.

Author Biography

THOMAS CHILDERS is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of five previous books on the Third Reich and the Second World War, most recently Wings of Morning and In the Shadows of War.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
"When This Bloody War Is Over"	p. 15
Anticipation	p. 17
Shock	p. 45
Anxiety	p. 75
"Soldier from the Wars Returning"	p. 103
As If Nothing Had Ever Happened	p. 105
Open Wounds	p. 137
"It's Been a Long, Long Time"	p. 171
Echoes of War	p. 203
"The War's Over, Soldier"	p. 205
Aftershocks	p. 237
Picking Up the Pieces	p. 263
Author's Note	p. 291
Acknowledgments	p. 295
Selected Primary Sources	p. 297
Notes	p. 301
Index	p. 327
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.