cover image Love and Politics in Wartime: Letters to My Wife, 1943-45

Love and Politics in Wartime: Letters to My Wife, 1943-45

Benedict S. Alper. University of Illinois Press, $28.95 (248pp) ISBN 978-0-252-01877-0

This intimate and entertaining correspondence, definitely from an earlier age, portrays Americans who are not ugly, men who are unafraid of emotional commitment and war that is just. In daily letters to wife Ethel, his ``darlingest dearest'' and scores of other endearments, ``Bup'' (as he signs off) describes his life in wartime Italy and North Africa as administrator for the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, charged with helping civilians, refugees and POWs. Alper, who became a criminologist after the war, has a gift for storytelling and provides wonderful vignettes of American soldiers amiably making their way among Berbers, Arabs, elite British officers and the Italian demi-monde. With sympathy and occasional flashes of brilliance, he depicts the traffic of displaced persons, postwar politics, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius and wartime bombings. Always he expresses fidelity and yearning for Ethel. The letters gain added piquancy from their evocation of a time when Americans were more exuberant, more hopeful and more innocent. (Apr.)