This is what all beginning memoirists fear. Mark Doty experienced it first hand, when his father returned the manuscript to his book “Firebird,” with a note that read: “You cannot sing your ancestors’ songs as they intended them to be sung . . . if you sing them at all, you betray them.” This is, as Doty points out, “every memoirist’s nightmare: that we will lose the people in our lives by writing about them.”
The book reads like a novel, and even though everyone (hopefully) knows how the war ultimately ended, he keeps the reader turning the pages with his gripping prose. It's a more than worthy addition to the long list of books about World War II, and a bravura performance by one of America's greatest storytellers.
Blumenthal has done her job well: presenting the history, and leaving readers to wrestle with what the future may hold for families facing unwanted pregnancies.