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Explores the experiences of children (now men and women in their fifties and sixties) who grew up during World War II, in the context of developmental psychology, and argues that the war left an indelible imprint on them, not only in childhood but in adulthood as well.
This story depicts a woman and two children whose husband and father is fighting in combat. The son, who is a fifth grader in elementary school, finds it very hard to accept the fact that his dad is away from home and fighting in a war. He is very upset. The absence of his father has affected his schooling and his relationship with his mother, his little sister, and his peers. His teacher observes the sudden change in both his behavior and his academics and summons his mother to a conference. The teacher and the administration were shocked to find out that the boy's father was fighting in combat. A survey of the student body at the school disclosed the fact that more than fifty students had parents or close relatives fighting in combat. The outcome of the conference caused the creation of a student support team. The students were able to meet twice a week, sharing their feelings about the absence of their family members who are fighting in the war. The fifth grader soon realizes how noble his dad is and why he went to war. He writes to his dad and tells him that he is proud of him and that he should be careful. He also made it known to his dad that he, too, wants to be a soldier when he grows up. This is a thrilling story dedicated to children all over the world, whose parents or close relatives are fighting in combat, or protecting people who are living in war-torn countries. Dr. Pauline Wright
When she was very young, Irene Kacandes knew things about her father that had no plot, no narrator, and no audience. To her childhood self these things resembled beings who resided with her family, like the ancestresses who’d thrown themselves off cliffs rather than be taken by the Turks, or the forefathers who’d fought the Trojans. For decades she thought of these cohabitants as Daddy’s War Experiences and tried to stay away from them. When tragedy touched the adult life she had constructed for herself, however, she realized she had to confront her family’s wartime past. Kacandes begins with what she did know: that her immigrant grandmother returned to Greece with four young children—and without her husband—only to get trapped there by the Nazi occupation. Though still a child himself, her father, John, helped feed his younger siblings by taking up any task possible, including smuggling arms to the Resistance. Kacandes painstakingly uncovers a complex truth her father chose not to tell, a truth inextricably entwined with the Holocaust, discovering, too, a common but little-told story about how the telling of such memories is negotiated between survivors and their children. Daddy’s War brings new understanding to how trauma, like the revenge of Greek gods, can visit each generation and offers a model for breaking the cycle.
Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by “Frogs” and “Toads,” humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America’s small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father’s adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist’s small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art’s reputation for “outsider” or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler’s thorough analysis of his father’s adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.
Al Murray's (AKA The Pub Landlord) musing on his childhood where his fascination with history and all things war began. Have you ever watched a film with someone who, at the most dramatic scene, argues that the plane on screen hasn't been invented yet? Or that the tank rumbling towards the hero at the end of the film is the wrong tank altogether? Al Murray is that someone. Try as he might, he can’t help himself. Growing up in the 1970s, Al, with the help of his dad, became fascinated with the history of World War Two. They didn’t go to football; they went to battlefields. Because like so many of his generation whose childhood was all about Airfix, Action Man and Where Eagles Dare, he grew up in the cultural wake of the Second World War. Part memoir, part life obsession, this is Al Murray musing on what he knows best. And he’s sure to tell you things about history that you were never taught at school.
The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller Chris Tarrant and his father Basil were very close, they played sport together, watched sport together and shared the same sense of humour. Chris loved and admired his father but it was only after his death he realised that he hardly knew him at all ... Basil Avery Tarrant grew up in 1920s Reading, where the smell of beer and biscuits from the local factories filled the air. He worked as an administrator in a local factory and spent his Saturday nights down at the music halls. But what happened to Basil during the war, and how he came to be awarded the Military Cross, remained a mystery to Chris and his family for nearly sixty years. In this emotional journey, Chris discovers that Basil was involved in some of WWII’s most significant campaigns, including the Dunkirk evacuation and the D-Day landings, and also took part in some of the most brutal, close-range fighting in Cleve. Dad's War is a profoundly moving and heartfelt tribute to a much-loved father, but it’s also a sincere and humble commemoration of the bravery and sacrifice of the soldiers of WWII.
Derek's lifelong work is about to be sold to pornographers for a lot of money. His wife has left him, for that and other reasons, and he's having a hard time keeping existential focus. Into this maelstrom, flies a package from his mother that contains his father's account of his experiences in the European theater of World War II. As he reads about his father's war, while struggling with the business deal and its ramifications for his idea of himself, he begins to expand his understanding not only of who his father was and the character of his country, but also of the ebb and flow of the seemingly conscious force of war. All of which comes into focused during one terrifying night of the rape of a girl.
Charley Valeras own father had spent almost 4 years fighting during WWII and lived out the rest of his life without a story to tell. To share stories that hadnt been discussed in decades, Valera conducted heartfelt interviews using video to pen and chronicled them in a way to bring the reader into the battlefield, aircraft or destroyer. A combination between The Greatest Generation and Saving Private Ryan.
