" War Babies: The Generation That Changed America " examines the lives and careers of Americans born between 1939 and 1945. No one has written such a book about this generation. " War Babies " deals especially with musicians and composers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel; with film directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese; with actors like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro; with athlete/activists like Muhammad Ali; with journalists like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; and with politicians like John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. These are the people who continue to shape our lives and cultures in the 21st century.
Busch's novel "War Babies" is a short, powerful moral tale that sheds light upon the insidious nature of evil and the grip history holds on the lives of the seemingly protected innocent.
Colonel, Brian Collins, U.S. Army, Federal Marshal Tim Fallon and Dr.Michael Shea all born in 1946 and representative members of the War Baby Generation are introduced in the opening chapters of the novel, the year all three men turn fifty. The murder of an Army officer and her New York City Police Detective lover, bring Brian, his two childhood friends, and those important to, their past and present lives, together again, in a literary thriller played out in places like Fort Bragg, North Carolina, New York City, New Jersey and Honduras. Behind the media accounts of the war against crime by municipalities where police commanders publically account (Comstat) for the rise and fall of crime in their precincts, and the precision and gadgetry of military smart bombs, behind the strategies and tactics of the Department of Defense, there are people, up and down the chain of command, good and bad, members of paramilitary and military organizations, the rank and file with their own personal drives, ambitions, needs, dark and light sides. War Babies is a story about three of them, drawn together by a murder which connects all three and the people important to them. Metaphorically, War Babies is not without a necessary degree of infant mortality. Death, destruction, complication and intrigue are character driven and serve to intensify and realistically portray the story lives of the characters. War Babies is about evolved characters coming to terms with themselves, their partners and a world that the baby boomer generation largely created themselves. Having spent twenty-six years, in one part of my life in places like Europe, Central America and the United States both active and reserve in the Army, where I began as a Private and retired as a Major and written, among other things, Of Cops and Priests and Fact and Fiction, I think War Babies mirrors the reality of police procedure, military protocol and every day characters.
War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with 19 emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures. This multiauthor volume features a foreward by Kent A. Ono, a co-authored preface and introductory essay by the editors, 19 original artist interviews conducted by the editors, and original essays from Wei Ming Dariotis and the contributing authors: Camilla Fojas, Stuart Gaffney, Rudy Guevarra, Jr., Eleana J. Kim, Richard Lou, Margo Machida, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Lori Pierce, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Ken Tanabe, and Wendy Thompson-Taiwo. Laura Kina is associate professor of art, media, and design at DePaul University. Wei Ming Dariotis is associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. "War Baby / Love Child is an interesting, original, and innovative project that expands the field of Asian American studies by using visual art as a point of entry and analysis for the discipline." -Mark Johnson, editor of Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 "One of the strengths of this original volume is its holistic combination of interviews with premier fine artists along with the textual, historical, and scholarly context provided by established and emerging scholars in Asian American Studies." -Nitasha Sharma, author of Hip Hop Desis: South Americans, Blackness, and Global Race Consciousness
Rachel Booker has a difficult start in life. When her father dies, deep in gambling debt, her mother must harden herself to make ends meet, but becomes so hard she has little room left for affection or warmth. Mother and daughter work at the open market in Birmingham, selling second-hand clothes or whatever they can find just to put a little food on the table. But the market has a silver lining: it's there that Rachel makes her first childhood friend, Danny. As they grow older, the friendship grows into something more and their innocent romance gives Rachel the care and comfort she's always craved. But at just sixteen, as World War II breaks out, Rachel falls pregnant. They marry in haste but it isn't long before Danny is called up. Left on the home front with a new baby and little else, Rachel must scrape by with the other residents of Sparkbrook. But if Danny ever makes it home, will he be the same boy she loved so fiercely? And if Rachel can sustain the family until then, will she end up as hard-hearted as her own mother? Annie Murray's War Babies is a moving and insightful novel about hardships on the home front and how the war changed everybody it touched . . .
What is a War Baby? War Babies, squeezed between the children of the Great Depression and the Boomers, have been described as part of the “Silent Generation” by Wikipedia. Richard Pell’s book on War Babies illuminated only celebrity names from those years while saying the war babies’ perspective on America was “darker and more pessimistic than either their predecessors or their baby boom successors.” While these and other generations have been, and will be written about, very little was recorded of the everyday life of War Babies to support that gloomy theory. War Babies lived in a time unknown to any generation before or after. Their America was unique, guided by parents who knew the importance of a nuclear family, and actually used their villages to raise their own and each others’ children. It was a time when the family who prayed together stayed together, and “for better or worse” was a sacred vow. For the most part, War Babies were taught such things as respect, manners, patriotism, and penmanship. They went to church with their families, took music lessons, and joined the 4H, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, They took pride in accomplishments, and didn’t need tattoos or purple hair to stand out in a crowd. They earned their accolades. War Babies lived such lives as small business owners, cooks and construction workers, salesmen and teachers, and much more. No matter the job, each War Baby honed the skills that complimented his profession. One in particular, started his development with a curiosity that exposed everyone he met as his straight man. His stories reflect the path that led him to be the person he is today.
25th February 1995 The Dark Destroyer vs the G-Man Nigel Benn and Gerald McClennan Two men with a reputation to defend - a reputation for brutal, unforgiving combat both in the ring and outside it. Ostensibly, they were fighting for a world title and a lot of money, the stuff of professional boxing. But this fight was different. It was a rare collision of wills, and few present had seen anything like it. After ten of the most gruelling and vicious rounds that the sport of boxing has ever witnessed McClellan finally was defeated. He knelt in his corner on one knee in submission. And he never got up. This is the story of what brought these two men together on the night of 25th February 1995 and how that night changed them forever. It's a story too about those associated with the promotion of public fist-fighting, who bend morality to suit their needs. It's a story that attempts to unravel the glamour of violence. William Hill Sports Book of the Year Finalist.
The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.
Over the course of World War II, two million American military personnel occupied bases throughout the South Pacific, leaving behind a human legacy of at least 4,000 children born to indigenous mothers. Based on interviews conducted with many of these American-indigenous children and several of the surviving mothers, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific explores the intimate relationships that existed between untold numbers of U.S. servicemen and indigenous women during the war and considers the fate of their mixed-race children. These relationships developed in the major U.S. bases of the South Pacific Command, from Bora Bora in the east across to Solomon Islands in the west, and from the Gilbert Islands in the north to New Zealand, in the southernmost region of the Pacific. The American military command carefully managed interpersonal encounters between the sexes, applying race-based U.S. immigration law on Pacific peoples to prevent marriage “across the color line.” For indigenous women and their American servicemen sweethearts, legal marriage was impossible; giving rise to a generation of fatherless children, most of whom grew up wanting to know more about their American lineage. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific traces these children’s stories of loss, emotion, longing, and identity—and of lives lived in the shadow of global war. Each chapter discusses the context of the particular island societies and shows how this often determined the ways intimate relationships developed and were accommodated during the war years and beyond. Oral histories reveal what the records of colonial governments and the military have largely ignored, providing a perspective on the effects of the U.S. occupation that until now has been disregarded by Pacific war historians. The richness of this book will appeal to those interested the Pacific, World War II, as well as intimacy, family, race relations, colonialism, identity, and the legal structures of U.S. immigration.
