Small Press & Self-Published Books about WWII

ALAN Review, Fall 2004 by Broz, Bill

Your moment of truth, your chance, could happen like this. You see a very small press release in your local news paper:

Author to sign book about Iowa guerrilla. In honor of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day on Sunday, a book about an Iowa World War II soldier will be featured at a book signing in Ames. The book. Lang: The WWII Story of an American Guerilla on Mindanao, Philippine Islands, was written about Dick Lang, an Iowa farm boy who, after the island where he was serving was invaded, joined the Filipinos as a guerrilla to fight the Japanese. The author, Norman Rudi, also an Iowan, will sign copies of his book from 1-3 p.m. Saturday at Waldenbooks in Ames.

You think-perhaps this book about an Iowan in WWII would be a good inclusion to my collection of WWII titles for my eighth grade WWII unit. Ames is just down the road. I should look into this. Maybe Dick Lang lives there and speaks to classes of students studying WWII. You decide to investigate before making the trip to Ames, and you land at Amazon.com ordering information and customer reviews:

Product Information:

Paperback: 151 pages

Publisher: McMillen Publishing:

(November 2003)

ISBN:1888223529

Usually ships in 24 hours

List Price: $14.95

Buy new: $14.95 Used & new from

$8.00

Reviewer 1: a reader from IA United States:

An unbelievable story of one man's journey through the war in his early 20's. I found this book to be very intense and emotional and very realistic. I have had the joy of having known Richard Lang for many years and have had to experience my own sorrow after his recent passing.

So, the book sounds promising but no visit from Mr. Lang. Like too many of his generation, he has died. Then, something troubling in the review:

I did see a few typographical errors and the story was somewhat choppy in areas, but it was so easy to look beyond that considering the adventure you are experiencing on his behalf.

The second review echoes similar themes:

Reviewer 2: a reader from Ames IA United States:

This is a great story of courageous men. I've met Mr. Lang and am inspired by what he has done. He is truly one of the great Americans of the greatest generation. The book is rather choppy and I was surprised to find so many typographical errors. Personally, I was willing to overlook that because of my interest in the story.

What do you do? Even though you have lost your chance to invite Mr. Lang to speak in your class, the story about his service sounds phenomenal, at least to two people from Ames who knew the man. Along with reading about what happened to Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel in WWIl, your students could read the story of someone from their state, their county even. They could read about WWIl in the Pacific theatre (not too many books in your collection about that). So, do you think like an American, an lowan, a person interested in the history of WWIl and interested in making that history come alive for your students-and buy the book? Or do you think like an English teacher and say, "I am not buying any book from some vanity press full of spelling errors!" (It's McMillen, not Macmillan).

We say buy the book while you have the chance. We say buy the next one you hear about too, and follow up on that one to see if the veteran who wrote it can come to your school to talk to your students. Such a move could become one of the most rewarding actions you take in your teaching career. Our thesis in the column is that books about WWII, especially firstperson accounts by veterans from you local area, are likely to come from small press or self-published sources rather than the Scholastic catalog. Bringing these diamonds in the rough into your classroom often requires quick action and a leap of faith. In this column Virginia Broz and I will discuss some of those leaps of faith we have taken and the rewards those leaps have brought. We will also review the publications we talk about, some of which you can buy. But our primary purpose here is to alert you to the treasure hunt in your own back yard. We estimate that no less than six times a year, the newspaper this small state of Iowa depends on, The Des Moines Register, carries a press release like the one above. Many more such press releases are carried only in city and regional papers. But we all know that there will be fewer and fewer of those press releases. The common figure in published accounts is that sixteen million American men and women served in WWII. About four million are alive today. They are dying at a rate of 1,000 per day.

Virginia Broz is a national board certified teacher of early adolescent English Language Arts and a twenty year veteran of the middle school classroom. Her story about one of those leaps began about ten years ago with a letter to the editor in The Fairfield Ledger, our local county newspaper in rural southeast Iowa.

Our eighth grade literature of WWII and the Holocaust unit, which had focused on just the Goodrich and Hackett play based on The Diary of Anne Frank in 1977 when I began teaching, had expanded to include hundreds of memoirs and novels by 1995. My theory is that the veterans and others who experienced WWII were deciding to tell their stories before it was too late. Many of the stories were told from the point of view of young people near the ages of the students in my classes, and students found the books accessible and interesting and often mesmerizing and moving.