Suggested Reading: Michigan Today takes notice of or reviews books by U-M faculty, graduates and students, and works published by the University of Michigan Press. We regret that we do not have space to publicize all of the unsolicited books we receive, nor to answer all inquiries and correspondence.

Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II
By James Tobin '78, '86 PhD, The Free Press, New York, 1997, $25 hardcover, $16.95, paper, University Press of Kansas.
For those who weren't reading newspapers during World War II, it is difficult to understand the phenomenon of Ernie Pyle (1900-45). Or at least it was before James Tobin's biography was published last.

A former editor of the Michigan Daily (see Fall 1997 MT), Tobin became interested in Pyle while working on his U-M doctoral dissertation, "Why We Fight: Versions of the American Purpose in World War II."

Deploying the skills of a reporter (he was a Pulitzer-nominee on the Detroit News) and historian, Tobin movingly portrays both Pyle and an era in which perhaps two-thirds of the American reading public followed the fate of their men and boys at war mainly through Pyle's six columns a week.

When Pyle was killed by a sniper on a small island near Okinawa on April 18, 1945, after surviving more than four years of warfare in London, North Africa, Italy and France, why did Americans mourn him equally with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died a week earlier? How did a short, scrawny, hypochondriacal Hoosier farm boy who had dropped out of Indiana University to work on a newspaper win such affection and respect?

We asked Tobin those questions shortly after he had won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Ernie Pyle's War.

Pyle developed his spare, restrained prose style in his nationally syndicated aviation column from 1928 to 1932, Tobin said. And from 1935-39, Pyle was a roving reporter whose beat was the Western hemisphere. A hallmark of his writing was his focus on the little guy, the average Joe, the gritty, noncomplaining, dutiful, practical and skillful unsung heroes working along the highways and byways and in the boondocks of the Americas.

When the war came, this character emerged as GI Joe, the Common Man Triumphant, a mythical figure, yet not an untruthful one. Tobin said Pyle communicated "the feelings of comradeship and fraternal love that exists among soldiers."

"Pyle followed the precepts of the journalism of his day," Tobin continued, "which was to write what they saw. They were not consciously ideological in the sense imposing an interpretation on the war. When Arthur Miller worked on the screenplay of The Story of GI Joe, a movie based on Pyle's war columns, he wanted to project the war through a New Deal lens that cast the war as an anti-fascist, liberal crusade. Pyle knew that most of the guys doing the fighting had no sense of the war like that. What they knew about the war was that the only way to survive was to help each other."

Pyle's skill and insight fit the reigning news medium. "When the U.S. forces invaded Iraq during the Gulf War," Tobin noted, "the American public could follow the action on TV. But on D Day, all the American public knew was that on June 6, 1944, some undetermined amount of forces had landed in some unidentified place on the northern coast of France. It was several days before anyone told them any details or described the scene. And the first thing they read was Ernie Pyle's 'Walk on the Beach' column." The column began: "I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead."

Pyle's sense of tragedy, his fatalism and underlying hatred of war, runs through Tobin's tale, which is told in a disarmingly plain prose that masks powerful emotion, a match for Pyle's own style. Serving as a strong subplot is Pyle's liquor-lubricated, painful yet deeply romantic marriage with Jerry Siebolds, a complex woman who Tobin says "may have had, in today's terminology, a bipolar or borderline personality disorder overlaid by alcoholism."

Tobin said the book's reception has surpassed his expectations. "I just hoped it would make the History Book of the Month Club and get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review," he said. It did that and more, with reviews and interviews in radio, TV and press. "But what has pleased me even more," Tobin said, "was to see people like my dad and father-in-law embrace their memories after reading the book. Their generation followed a don't-brag, don't-tell-bad-stuff norm. But now I think the World War II generation wants people to know what they went through. And they're right. We can join them and look back at it and appreciate the meaning of what they did. After all, if they'd lost-well-just think what the world could have been like."--John Woodford.

The Last Jewish Shortstop in America
By Lowell B. Komie '51, Swordfish, Chicago, 1997, $12.95.
Baseball and other sports are the main motif in this alternately poignant and satirical tale of David Epstein, a deal-maker/loser from Chicago who succeeds somewhat in organizing a hall of fame for Jewish athletes. The author, who is also a Chicago attorney, is at his comic best in the scenes in which Epstein consummates the deal with North Shore suburban Jewish professionals. The hero's attempts to cope with his roles as father, divorced husband and lonesome would-be lover prove him to be somewhat of a schlemiel and schmuck, but blessed with enough chutzpah to wind up as a real mensch.--JW.

Film Essays and Criticism
By Rudolf Arnheim, U of Wisconsin Press, 1997, $18.95.
These essays by the retired U-M faculty member Rudolf Arnheim mainly span the 1920s and '30s, but are as incisive as ever. His 1940 discussion of anti-fascist satire is possibly the briefest of critical masterpieces. He finds in the shortcomings of Chaplin's The Great Dictator the political limitations not only of Chaplin's effort, but also of our common Western popular film tradition in general. At the end of the film, Arnheim observed, we are left with the notion that the dictator Hinkel is an individual "whose elimination would restore peace and order to this pain-wracked world. This is a view expressed at this very hour by many misguided people. It must surely be apparent now that much more is involved than the fight against a few criminals. This is a fight against a system, against fascism. Anyone who wants to make effective his fight against Hitler has to know this, and to show this." Arnheim's beef is not against the use of satire to attack fascism, however. Instead he prescribes the kind of satire needed to expose fascism's "meanness of spirit, the hollowness of its boasting, the co-existence of enormously contrasting social elements. ... I remember at least a dozen wisecracks invented by the victims of fascism themselves that convey a deeper insight and a more essential interpretation than anything in The Great Dictator."--JW.