War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars Book

I think I'm in love with Andrew Carroll. I LOVE old letters, I love American history, and I especially love war histories told on a personal level. On top of it all, Carroll dedicated this book to the American women who experienced war both from the home and from the front lines, and who were primarily responsible for keeping the letters and the memories safe so that those stories would be remembered. American history with a focus on women during war? I think I just died and went to heaven.

Anyways, this is a wonderful collection. I especially enjoyed the WWII chapter, but all were fascinating and Carroll does such a great job of including letters from diverse sources. You can either peruse the collection and read the ones that sound most interesting, or you can do like I did and just read it cover-to-cover. It's actually quite an emotional experience, reading these letters: you start to read a letter and it's funny or sweet or earnest and you find yourself hoping that at the end there won't be a little italicized note at the bottom stating that the author had been killed in action just after writing it. And when you do get to the end and you do find that the author was killed, your heart kind of sinks a little. The letters are funny and sad and hopeful and desperate and poignant and wonderfully mundane and earnest and detached and all of them put a human, personal face on war.

I really enjoyed this book, and if you have any interest in the subject, I would strongly recommend this book.