2162 Not So Wild a Dream, by Eric Sevareid (read 14 Sep 1988) I first saw this book when it came out in 1946, and I came across the words in the title in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter--and assumed the words came from that book. But they are words written by Norman Corwin (though Hawthorne wrote them first). This is quite a book. Sevareid was born in 1912 and lived in Velva, N. D. in his early years--the banker's son in that tiny town not too far from Minot. He went to high school in Minneapolis, and made a fantastic canoe trip to Hudson's Bay when he was 17. He worked on a newspaper, went to the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1936. He was a fervent admirer of Floyd Olson, and a campus radical. He went as a correspondent to Europe before the war and he tells of the places he went, including bailing out of a plane in Burma, time in Chungking--very down on Chiang, high on the China hands McCarthy so vilified--this book was written before McCarthy--then back to North Africa, Italy, southern France. The book is somewhat over-written, pretentious--but I liked the rather purple descriptive prose. The tone is also pessimistic and rather depressing. He was very liberal, and I would have been enchanted beyond words if I had read the book in 1946. The book was an excellent read, dated as it is. I am glad I read it. ( )

Eric Sevareid (1912 - 1992) was a third generation Norwegian-American born and raised in a small town in northern North Dakota. His book of memoirs Not So Wild a Dream, published in 1947, is mostly about an action-filled 15 year period from high school graduation in 1930 (age 17) to the end of World War II (age 32). During that time Sevareid professionally and personally went through a number of adventures that typify his "Greatest Generation" and events of the world at large.

Sevareid was one of the pioneering "Morrow Boys", a team of radio journalists who filed daily radio journalistic pieces from Europe during the war. This allowed him to travel to many places and get up close to the front and fighting. Sevareid is at his best narrating his adventures, the book is episodic and some of the best include: Bombings in London during the Battle of Britain; the plane wreck while going over "the hump" into China; his experiences in Paris during the "phony war" and "Exodus"; the horrors of war on the Italian front; the D-Day invasion and subsequent Battle of the Rhine; the mutiny on-board a Liberty Ship in NY harbor. His accounts of the Great Depression, when he tramped around as a hobo on a train are really excellent, as is his description of a 2500 mile canoe trip, which is covered in more detail in his 1935 book Canoing with the Cree. These two books, written while still a young man, would be his most popular, and last real literary output - although he always considered himself a writer first, most of his later career was on television..

Sevareid was known for writing "think pieces", for example in one transcript, aired late in the war to popular acclaim, he talks about the unknowability of the experience of combat for a soldier, the impossibility of words to describe the immediate and often irrational emotions and thoughts of a soldier. These "think pieces" became a trademark of his later in life as a TV reporter, and Not So Wild a Dream often goes off on a thinking tangent. If there is a theme to the book, Sevareid is seeking the essence and spirit of his time and generation, what we might call the "Zeitgeist", and he often comes very close to capturing the immediate feeling of change. It is why this book is so important as a primary source for documenting the times and his generation. One of the more profound moments for me is when he sees a change in his generations attitude towards war:

"Our own men, whose cult was antimilitarism [in the 1930s students were highly anti-military], whose habit is to identify themselves merely as civilians in different cloths who detested soldiering, now subtly changed. There was a dash and verve about them that I had rarely observed before, and young boys would frankly say: "In Italy all i used to think about was going home. Now I kinda hate to quit before we get to Berlin." It was if they suddenly realized they were soldiers by profession, with the honest desire to complete this masterpiece of their skill down to the last detail."

Sevareid is right, during WWII the American military went from a small and and unpopular enterprise to a large beast that to this day is a major force in American culture, the consequences of which Eisenhower predicted in his military-industrial complex speech. Another area Sevareid muses on is the waning power of Britain and the ascending power of the USA - which given the events post-Cold War and the "Rise of the Rest" of the world, also has a prophetic tone. To get an idea what the US will be like as it becomes less relevant in the world - with the rise of China, India and the rest - one only has to read Sevareid's account of the waning power of Britain in the last chapters of the book.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

Sevareid covers his early adult hood and his WWII reporting experiences. A well written account of an interesting first 32 years of his life. ( )