Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World

In 1953, Mowat (Never Cry Wolf), who had been a soldier in the Canadian army, returned to see the France and Italy he had known only under wartime conditions. He relates how he and his wife, Frances, bought a car in England and drove through both countries, where he was astonished to be welcomed as a returning war hero. Savoring scenes both familiar and changed, the couple avoided tourist centers, sought out quiet places and relished local histories, architecture, landscapes and, above all, the regeneration of people who had put their wartime suffering behind them. Among his memorable discoveries, Mowat recalls the little pottery commune in an Italian seacoast cave near Positano where, without modern technology, the craftsmen and their families lived and worked, taking pleasure in ancient methods of refining and working clays; and, farther along the road, a fishing village where the fishermen limited their catches to what they and their neighbors could eat to avoid overfishing and thus preserve an age-old way of life for their children. Although time must now have changed much of what Mowat found, this is a disarmingly upbeat and gracefully written memoir. (Sept.)