This book examines the experiences and the reporting of women newspaper and magazine correspondents who covered World War II across the globe. It's a topic I had never really considered or thought about before reading the book, even though women entered many work forces during the war while so many men were off fighting, so it made perfect sense once I started reading it that war correspondent would be another kind of job women would step into. Journalism and nonfiction writing was also a field that women had begun entering during the 1920's when cultural expectations of a woman's role in the world had started to shift, and that meant there were experienced women journalists who were ready and able to fight for the opportunity to go cover the biggest stories of the times when war broke out.
The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.
Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.
Grade: B
The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.
Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.
Grade: B
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