Content area
Full Text
The War Diaries: An Anthology of Daily Wartime Diary Entries Throughout History. Edited by Irene and Alan Taylor. New York: Canongate, 2006. ISBN 1-84195-826-3. Bibliography. Index of diarists. Pp. xix, 676. $18.00.
The editors of this book have assembled a fine collection of diary entries from civilians, combatants, writers, government officials, and others. Excerpts from almost two hundred diaries are included, from the AngloDutch wars of the seventeenth century to the Iraq War of 2003. Together, they poignantly depict the countless ways in which warfare affects individual lives. The entries are organized by calendar date, such that a whole sweep of history is covered in a day's worth of entries. Careful attention to the date and location of the entry is therefore required in order to properly contextualize the narrative therein. Readers should also take note of a certain skew toward British diarists from the two world wars. Entries related to the Korean War and the Arab-Israeli conflicts are notable omissions despite the collection's wide breadth, while the usefulness of including mere handfuls of entries from the Boer Wars and the Kosovo and Chechnyan conflicts is unclear.
Diaries are by their nature instruments for depositing the writer's perceptions of events on a given day. This collection of such deposits captures an interweaving of everyday concerns with the effects of massive...