The Good War
by Studs Terkel
Summary
Studs Terkel built The Good War entirely out of other people's voices, gathering more than a hundred interviews with Americans, and some non Americans, who lived through the Second World War and arranging them with almost no narration of his own beyond brief introductions. The people speaking range from combat veterans such as Eugene Sledge, describing the Pacific fighting in plain, unsparing terms, to women who took factory jobs on the home front, to a former admiral, Gene LaRocque, offering a career officer's skeptical retrospect on the war he helped fight, to survivors on the Axis side and civilians who lived through Pearl Harbor, the bombing campaigns and the atomic strikes that ended the war.
The book's title comes with its own built in irony, and Terkel makes sure a reader feels it. Many of his subjects do call the war good, the last conflict in living memory that most Americans agreed was necessary and just, and yet the individual accounts that make up the book keep surfacing loss, trauma and moral confusion that the label good war cannot really contain. Terkel arranges the voices into loosely themed sections rather than a single chronological account, letting a reader move from the home front to the Pacific to occupied Europe and back without a single narrator smoothing the transitions.
Reading it means encountering history as a chorus rather than as one continuous story, and it suits a reader who wants the felt texture of a war remembered by the people who actually lived through it rather than a strategic or political account of how it was fought. The mosaic structure rewards reading a chapter at a time as much as reading straight through, since each voice largely stands on its own.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Terkel the 1985 award for general nonfiction for a book Pantheon Books had published the previous year. That year's other finalists were Donald Keene's Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era and Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World.
The book helped cement Terkel's reputation as the country's leading practitioner of oral history, a method he had already used on earlier books about work and the Depression, and it remains the one most often assigned as an introduction to the form. The novelist Max Brooks has named it directly as an inspiration for his own oral history structured novel World War Z, one clear line of influence running from Terkel's chorus of voices into later popular nonfiction and fiction alike.