ALL THE BRAVE PROMISES

This is the memoir of a young American volunteer WAAF in England, twenty years ago, based largely on novelist Mary Lee Settle's notes taken at the time (all the time). Her impressions reflect a romantic military commitment on her part, as well as a ""slow energy-sucking awareness"" of the isolation, anonymity, impersonality, injustice and complete indifference of this particular experience--not just hers but the ""common negative experience of ten-tenths of the world."" The book, casual, fragmentary, sketchy, consists not of ""events"" but of ""stops in time"" and if it is somewhat indeterminate in its appeal, some of the set scenes and spot impressions retain a good deal of their original immediacy.