interesting read. Strange to say, it never occurred to me the impact the war would have had on something like the development of paperbacks or the democratization of higher education. ( )

I was afraid this book would be dull, but I was quickly drawn into the story. I loved the idea that a group of librarians found a way to stand up against the censorship of the Nazi book burnings and that the publishers took it one step further to provide soldiers with books that were easy to carry with them into some pretty rough places. It was heartwarming to read the letters from grateful GIs and to learn that for some the books they were exposed to through the ASE program led to further education after the war. I knew nothing about this effort to provide books to the troops in WWII before reading this book, and I am pleased to learn that so many people worked hard to counteract the call to censorship and to provide books that enhanced the quality of life in difficult times. I'm appalled by the growing call to ban books from our schools and libraries in our present day. How can we ever be a discerning public if our children cannot read widely from diverse ideas and decide for themselves their value?

Speaking of librarians . . .before the war, 88% of librarians were men, after the war began, 88% were women. Charles P. Taft, a Cincinnatian, who worked for a government program that included the ASE program, said it would never work unless a layman--and he meant a MAN--headed it. ( )

Really interesting book. It's hard to imagine soldiers being able to immerse themselves in a book while they're hip deep in nasty foxholes but this book brings it back to life. Some of the letters from the GIs to the authors are so sweet and moving. And it gets better--an appendix with a complete list of the ASE titles! Because everybody needs more books on their to-read list, right? ( )

As a prose stylist, Ms. Manning tends occasionally to lapse into sterile textbookese. Nonetheless, she offers a well-researched and concise history of a fascinating moment in the literary life of United States that tells, in fact, several stories about the power of emotions and ideas in our common intellectual life.

Hitler’s “total war” included a war on books and the ideas they contained. The grim beginning of this war is described in the foreword to Steven Vincent Benét’s work “They Burned the Books”, recounting the thousands of books that were burned in a symbolic gesture in Berlin in 1933.

“On May 10, 1933, a tribe of barbarians retreated to the dark forests of the mind from which they had come, and made a bonfire of twenty-five thousand books in which men had set down their belief in themselves. These books included the great classics of the modern world, and later a ban was laid against the Word on which the conscience of Christendom rests - the Old Testament and the New. The burning and banning of these books, as symbolic as the Crucifixion itself, was a declaration of war, a war against mankind waged by that part of mankind that wishes to be less than itself.”


It was the beginning of the bibliocaust of WWII. By the end of this war, 100 million books had been destroyed, either intentionally in sanctioned book burnings, or as casualties of fire, bombings, etc.

America launched a counter-offensive in the war on ideas by creating the Victory Book Campaign and the Council on Books in Wartime. Together, these two groups collected and produced books for the servicemen overseas to read and take comfort in. It was described as the most successful morale-boosting activity of the war.

By the end of the war, they had produced and sent 123 million books overseas to both the European and Pacific theaters, thereby exceeding the number destroyed by war.
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