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I Will Tell No War Stories

What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II
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When I grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of my father's time in the Air Force. Like most of his generation, it was a rule with him not to talk about what he'd seen at war. "You're not getting any war stories from me," he'd say. Cleaning up the old family house the year before he died, I was surprised to find a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. I began to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history I thought I knew. I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in our family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace? I Will Tell No War Stories is, finally, about learning to live with history, a theme I have explored in some of my earlier books like In the Memory House and The Same Ax, Twice. The New York Times called In the Memory House a "wise and beautiful book." In another review, the Times said, "The Same Ax, Twice is filled with insight and eloquence... a memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom."
Howard Mansfield has written a dozen books, sifting through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. The late critic Guy Davenport said: "Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent."
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