Very familiar materials, arranged far too neatly but Wouk is a gifted enough storyteller and dialogue-writer to make each personal sequence-from sub warfare to concentration-camp horrors-flicker with momentary vitality. Meanwhile, Natalie's old Polish cousin Berel is escaping from Auschwitz with filmed evidence of atrocities, and Natalie's old flame, diplomat Leslie Slote, is trying to convince the complacent Allies that there really is a holocaust going on in Europe. And son Byron is a submarine diving officer whose Jewish wife Natalie is stuck in Italy with her author uncle they will almost escape many times before being brutalized by Eichmann in concentration camps, thus rediscovering their Jewishness. Son Warren is a dive-bomber pilot killed at Midway. Pug's wife back home has a lover who's working on the A-bomb. "Pug" Henry is Admiral Halsey's favorite commander-a vital presence at the battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf, with time out to be FDR's Lend-Lease emissary in Moscow and then sit in on the Teheran conference. Again Wouk's inbred cast of characters is programmed to be at all the right places and represent all the big issues. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima with Herman Wouk and the Henry family: an even longer book than The Winds of War (1971), with even greater emphasis on "scrupulous accuracy of locale and historical fact" at the expense of emotional involvement.
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