Reviews for Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II

The average rating for Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-29 00:00:00 Kevin Shorten First of all, I would like to say that the title of this book is misleading. There is very little of WWII in this book. A more appropriate title would have been “Memorizing Brainless Advertising Slogans and Playing Dumb Games With My Sister in Baltimore”. Since I rarely watch CBS, I had never heard of Charles Osgood before. There is a photograph of him at the end of this book, and I noticed that he looks rather likable. Therefore, I have nothing personal against the author. However, taken from this memoir, I must say that as a 9-year-old, he definitely wasn’t very bright. I don’t wish to brag, but it is the naked truth that, considering all the senseless games he played and the stupid things he did at age 9, I had significantly more brain as a preschooler. I can only hope that Mr. Osgood’s intelligence rocketed when he grew older. The first two thirds of the book are rather boring. The last third is written a bit amusing, at least, part of it. The most positive I can say about the book is that it is very short. It is actually more a booklet than a book. So I didn’t waste much time on it. The list price of the booklet is a proud $ 13.95. Am I ever glad I didn’t pay this amount. I obtained this little memoir for 10 cents at a clearance sale at Big Lots, a few years ago. So the investment was justifiable, and I didn’t suffer any financial damage. I would actually rate this booklet 2 1/2 stars, but I rounded up because it kind of interested me how kids lived in America during WWII, while I spent my pre-school years in Hitler's Germany under less favorable conditions.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-27 00:00:00 Margarita Quintana “Defending Baltimore” is a phrase that one might more typically associate with the War of 1812, with Fort McHenry and Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the case of Charles Osgood’s Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack, however, the historical context is not the War of 1812 but rather the Second World War, and Osgood is defending Baltimore from the homefront of his childhood imagination, recalling his boyhood certainty that “Hitler would of course make his first target [the northwest Baltimore neighborhood of] Liberty Heights” (p. 9). Osgood, a radio and television journalist long associated with CBS, looks back on A Boyhood Year During World War II (the book’s subtitle) with a definite sense of nostalgia – something that will be no surprise to regular viewers of CBS News’ Sunday Morning feature program, for which Osgood as host always wore a bowtie that seemed to signal his appreciation for the values of earlier times. Osgood admits that this look back to his sixty-years-gone Baltimore boyhood is likely to be somewhat nostalgic – “memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time” – but then insists that “I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing” (pp. 2-3). The sepia-toned cover photograph of Osgood as a boy reinforces that sense of nostalgia. Osgood provides engaging details from his childhood in Baltimore – listening to radio programs like The Shadow in those pre-TV days; going with his father to Memorial Stadium to watch the old minor-league Baltimore Orioles, “a Triple-A team that often played Double-A ball” (p. 45); running away from home with his sister, only to end up at the Ambassador movie house watching Holiday Inn; responding to anxiety about an upcoming church organ performance by unplugging the organ; debating with a friend the relative merits of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in its original version (took Osgood a week) versus reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in its Classic Comics version (took Osgood’s friend ten minutes). Such passages recall the avuncular tone of Osgood’s broadcasts for his Osgood File radio program, and they do well at capturing the long days of childhood, summer days when time seems to stretch out without limit, toward a horizon where life and childhood somehow go on forever. The photographs that Osgood includes, both from his own family's life and from the larger history of World War II, are also helpful. My chief reservation regarding this fun little book relates to the way in which Osgood tends to use his reverence for the past to suggest that the past was somehow better than the present, as when he talks about differing attitudes toward childhood and play in the 1940’s vis-à-vis the 2000’s. It was clever, for example, when Osgood made fun of the modern practice of parents arranging “play dates” for their children by writing that “we never had a ‘play date.’ A play date was any date that you played. My play dates were 1939 to 1950” (p. 50). Witty, and well-stated: point taken. Unfortunately, though that clever bit of phraseology is part of a much longer passage in which Osgood goes on at some length regarding his childhood as “a time of much more play than work, and the play almost always was merrily improvised, not organized by adults….In that innocent time, a soccer mom would have been a mother who played for Brazil. The lives of forties children weren’t organized as if they were wee CEOs: The kids weren’t driven in any way, neither pressured to be superkids nor chauffeured from one activity to another by a mother hell-bent on admission to Harvard, perhaps by the time the child was six” (pp. 49-50). That tone of a jeremiad or philippic seems strongly at odds with the nostalgic emphasis of much of the book. Similarly, Osgood later bemoans what he sees as the loss of "the kind of mental discipline that seems to have almost disappeared from the American grammar school, where the teachers are tenderly concerned with whether their students feel good. In a forties grammar school, as long as you didn't have scurvy, the way you felt was considerably less important than the way you thought" (p. 124). Such sermonizing, especially in a book that is only 139 pages long, is not helpful - and it makes the book significantly less fun. Like Osgood, I grew up in Maryland – though somewhat later in time, and in Montgomery County rather than Baltimore City. I enjoyed Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack as a memoir of a Maryland childhood, and as a look back at the World War II era. Osgood’s many fans are particularly likely to enjoy this book, especially if they share Osgood’s conservatism and his reverence for the past. Osgood even ends the book with one of his trademark songs, adapting an older pop song by providing a new set of lyrics that look back at his book’s content, just the way he used to do at the end of some episodes of CBS Sunday Morning. If such an approach to life and history sounds good to you, then read and enjoy. If not, then Osgood will see you on the radio.