War for Kids
Dozens of new books pour uninvited into the Reader office each week, half of them posing formulaic solutions to the quandary of how to fill an inconsequential life with wealth and meaning. One recent oddity is something else entirely, yet it touches on the theme of mattering. It’s an adolescents’ history of the Spanish Civil War; we read it and now we hope our oldest daughter will. It could teach her things she doesn’t know yet about bravery, honor, hate, death, failure, and blind ingratitude.
“So I did,” said Lawson. He wrote The United States in World War II. A friend in charge of children’s literature at the Chicago Public Library asked if he planned to do any more. Lawson didn’t. “She said, ‘Somebody should do a book for teenagers on World War I. I get requests from boys every day on World War I and the only thing I have to show them is Nordhoff and Hall’s Falcons of France.’
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So anyway, Lawson continued, “I said to my wife, why don’t I do all the wars? She said, ‘I think you’re just crazy enough to try it.’ So I thought, what the hell, I’ll do them one at a time. In between I did a bunch of books on other subjects on American history.”
He’s at work on two more books at the moment, one on the Bay of Pigs, another on the Iran hostage drama. He just finished a teen history of corruption in the highest places.
“For what seems like at least a month of Sundays, we have been suffering through an excess of overblown and overwrought baloney about Woodstock . . .” thundered Ray Coffey, editor of the editorial page. “It’s all been embarrassing, not least to the news media, which have been responsible for much of the ridiculous romanticizing about a crowd of self-indulgent people . . .”
“Did you read Royko today?” asked Towers, giving us the other. “He said the same thing [as Coffey]. So you’ve got to lump us with the Tribune.”
