Reviews

War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk

Only show reviews with written explanations

deannamartin113's review against another edition

3.0

Listened on Audible. I finished Winds of War (#1) in January 2017 and I think I just got tired of the Henry family and took a long break. The story was just okay. I came away not really caring what happened to any of them. I didn't really like any of the characters. Maybe we weren't supposed to. Rhoda Henry and Aaron Jastrow were particularly annoying, oh, and Pamela Tudsberry, and Byron Henry and Madeline Henry, and Pug Henry, and Warren Henry and Janice Henry and... I did enjoy the factual aspects of the book and the parts what were "written" and disputed histories by Pug Henry and a German Historian. Thinking on it now, there was one redeemable character who I did like - Leslie Sloat; just one.

mllejoyeuxnoel's review against another edition

Go to review page

5.0

Another reread. Still one of my all-time favorite series. Makes me so mad that the miniseries from the ‘80s was so terrible. Maybe I should @ HBO on this…

chrissyh's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

mrbear's review against another edition

Go to review page

5.0

First off, the audiobook on Audible was excellent, and highly recommended as probably the best way to “read” this book.

Overall, I learned more from this 2 book series about WWII than I knew before from a “good American education” by a wide margin. Unlike Follett’s Century trilogy, these books follow much more of the military aspects of the war, the plight of European Jews, and the war in the Pacific. It also interacts much more with world leaders, and proves great macro-context. This makes the two series great complements, and are both worth reading.

There’s not much to say otherwise. If you read and liked book 1, this is a no brainer, and just as good as the first book.

sfschmidt93's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous informative tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

The book can become dense when it goes (and stays) into the details of the military strategy of WWII.

dooo's review

Go to review page

challenging dark informative slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

jonreadsbooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

What’s better than 1,000 pages of excellent reading about WW2 fiction? A second book that is just as great and also over 1,000 pages.

iceberg0's review against another edition

Go to review page

2.0

Similar problems with the first one. Near the end he starts to give up on writing a story and just sticks with a bunch of thinly disguised exposition.

nicofic's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0

oceanwriter's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark informative tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

When I started The Winds of War, I told myself I wasn’t going to get so invested that I went on to War and Remembrance. Where the action had significantly picked up at the end of book one, I found myself not only invested, be eager to read book two. The beginning of the book maintained the faster pace that concluded the previous and I was ecstatic. However, this is still a 1000+ page book. It slowed down again. While consistently interesting, it is long.

Picking up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the book continues to follow the members of the Henry family (Pug, Rhoda, Warren, Byron, and Madeline) as well as Byron’s wife Natalie and their son Louis, her uncle Aaron Jastrow, Pamela Tudsbury, and a few others. Each of them is facing a different aspect of the war: Pug, Byron, and Warren in the Pacific, Natalie, Louis, and Aaron in Europe evading the Nazis at all costs, and Rhoda and Madeline on the Homefront. Their circumstances offer unique perspectives of war to the pages, perhaps most profoundly Aaron Jastorw’s ‘A Jew’s Journey’ facing antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Like The Winds of War, there are multiple mediums of writing that discuss the characters’ lives as well as general World War II history. Both are interesting, but having them side by side in a single narrative breaks the flow of storytelling immensely. While the characters are in 1943, the next chapter can talk about the end of the war — events that the characters have yet to experience. I found it distracting and sometimes frustrating.

Another issue I have is with the way the book is organized. Even though the book is broken up into different parts and names the key event of that section, most of the time a majority of the chapters are not even focused on the characters named or the situation highlighted. The narrators are inconsistent, and despite having spent so much time reading, there are still some characters that made such a brief appearance that I had no idea who they were and why they were suddenly telling the story from their point of view. Other instances left characters completely abandoned, such as Janice Henry and for the most part, Madeline, who may as well have not existed at all. I didn’t find much purpose to her character in the first book and she had even less of a purpose in this book. Her life gets put together in the background with little reference to book one.

My complaints aside, I do think this is a wonderful work of historical fiction. The writing is thorough as well as the research, and though it makes for chaotic storytelling, it is interesting that the book covers so many different aspects of life during the war right down the the strain on families. I wish it spent a little less time on the ‘romances’, as the characters have such little room to develop strong personalities and a rapport with the reader, but I digress. Given the time the book was written and published, the length of both of the books is not surprising with all the research that had to have been collected. If someone plans on only reading one work of World War II fiction, this would be the one I would suggest for the history factor alone. It’s above all an informative read even for someone well-versed in this time period.

Content Warnings

More...