<< Back 8/28/02 A book of Life: pictorial depicts triumphs, downfalls of WW2 SMN Life: World War 2 by Richard Stolley. Little, Brown, 2001. $60 — 352 pp. Forty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans had the world brought to their doorstep by Life magazine. My own parents subscribed to Life, and I can still remember turning the pages of this oversized magazine, looking at the pictures of Churchill’s funeral in England, of smiling teenagers jammed into a phone booth, of the faces of dead soldiers during a week of particularly vicious fighting in Vietnam. Looking back at that time, the late 50s and the 60s, I realize now how much Life colored my view of those times, how powerful were the photographs and the captions that accompanied them. Life had also covered World War II, dispatching photographers around the globe to record this greatest and most horrific of conflicts. Many fine journalists wrote for Life during the war, but for most Americans I suspect that the magazine meant photographs, page after page of pictures depicting the way men and women fought a war from Africa to China. Now a former editor of Life, Richard Stolley, has put together a collection of World War II photographs in a book titled Life: World War 2. Although not all of the pictures in this collection were shot by Life photographers — Stolley and his picture editor, Christina Lieberman, found photographs in various archives around the world — the format of the book is done in the old style of Life magazine, with incisive comments accompanying each of the pictures. There are also various commentaries by different writers, including the premier military historian John Keegan and the underrated John Eisenhower, the son of the former president. Although some photographs here will be familiar to readers — the landings in Normandy, the parade of humiliated Nazi collaborators in France, the devastation of Coventry Cathedral — many of the 665 pictures in this large book will be new to readers. The shot of the German soldier, comforted by a medic and two comrades, whose blown-away arm lies in the grass beside him, brings out the horror of war for the common soldier, no matter what side he fought for. The continuing pictures of rubble in the cities of Europe not only reinforce the images of the war’s devastation, but also leave the reader realizing how truly remarkable was the European recovery and the extent of American assistance after the war. The action shots of soldiers, sailors, and airmen are particularly compelling in this volume. In the section titled “Atlantic Ocean,” for example, we see six remarkable photographs of survivors of different ship sinkings, men whose merchant ships were attacked by German submarines. On the following pages are pictures from Stalingrad — German prisoners being rounded up by Soviet soldiers; a dead German, tunic aflame, on the turret of a tank; a Soviet soldier caught by the photographer falling from an explosion. The written narrative of the book works well in setting the pictures into context. The selected historians give us the general background of the conflict; the comments beside the pictures help to provide the details on everything from civilian casualties at Pearl Harbor to the training of Japanese kamikaze pilots. Along with these narratives are mini-biographies of men like Stalin, Roosevelt, and the spy Richard Sorge. One flaw in Life: World War 2 (and I’m not sure why or when some historians and writers began writing 2 instead of the more conventional Roman numeral II) is the inclusion throughout the book of modern-day photographs and comments to tell the rest of the story about some issue. The editors, who call these sections “Then/Now,” give us photographic essays on the United Nations, the founding of Israel, women in the workplace, international justice, and the rise of airpower. Although these subjects might make an interesting book regarding the last 50 years, they distract from the focus of a book on World War II. Putting these sections at the back of the book, as a sort of post-war comment, might have improved their inclusion. (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)