THIS WAS YOUR WAR

Frank Bookhouser has assembled a potpourri of writing about Americans in World War II -- some of it brilliant, a great deal of it exceptional, part of it routine. This is an odd mixture of fiction and non-fiction, but blood, death and mud are the common denominators of so many stories that the reader should be warned against attempting too much at one sitting. Brookhouser has included excerpts from most of the ""big"" war novels like The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, Mr. Roberts, The Caine Mutiny, plus everything from Walter Lord's detailed recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbor to bits of reportage from Time Magazine. If the book does nothing else it will recall the brilliance of Ernie Pyle's writing -- his famous The Night They Brought Captain Waskow Down is among columns included. Of current interest is John Hersey's detailed, dramatic account of young Lt. John F. Kennedy's heroism as a P-T boat skipper. And the late Meyer Berger's reporting in The First War Dead Come Home may bring a tear to many an eye. In the author's words, this is ""mostly a book for all of the men who were in the war. It is a scrapbook, a memory book, a nostalgia book"".