Word: wouk
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Consider the historical novels of James Michener, Gore Vidal and Hermann Wouk, or films such as Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War, and Oliver Stone's JFK. All of these works carry political messages, as do many academic works of history. But these messages are intimately bound to their historical vehicle. Glory, for example, could only work with its Civil War setting. Likewise, JFK, as outlandish as its interpretation of the Kennedy assassination may be, nevertheless attempts to participate in the historical dialogue and inquiry, through an unorthodox, non-academic medium...
...doorstop best sellers go, Herman Wouk's melodramas The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were tolerable entertainment. The historical framework of World War II was well enough known that the author could focus on the adventures of his solid-oak characters without having to teach history. That's not true of The Hope (Little, Brown; 693 pages; $24.95), Wouk's earnest novel about Israel's first two decades, beginning with the fight for independence in 1948 and carrying through...
...author's new book destroys itself before the reader's eyes, as a fascinating popular history battles without success to free itself from a fat, tedious novel. What is interesting here -- Wouk is right about this -- is the improbable succession of bluffs and heroics by which the new and perilously weak Jewish state managed to defend itself. But the writer, now 78, chooses to deal with Israel's wars, and the confounding historical intricacies that shaped them, on a level that allows only slightly more subtlety than a grade- school Thanksgiving pageant...
Another doorstop-size novel from Herman Wouk...
This tautly written volume is The Caine Mutiny of the Vietnam War. Like Herman Wouk's wonderfully elusive Captain Queeg, the Green Beret conspirators, beginning with Colonel Rheault, seem indisputably guilty, however tragic the circumstances. But by the time Stein is finished, in Kafkaesque fashion no assumptions remain unchallenged. War, Stein implies, defies moral judgment, though judgments must be drawn. One such judgment was drawn by Daniel Ellsberg: the Green Beret case served to harden his determination to publish the Pentagon papers. The rest, as they say, is history...