Natalie Jastrow is accurately described by other characters as a lioness.Įven minor figures in the large cast usually pass the test made famous in the Red Letter Media review of “The Phanton Menace,” with easily recognized personality traits. Aaron Jastrow’s intelligence and aloofness renders him blind to the true danger of Hitler’s rise.

His son Byron is immature, but with more of his father’s morality than his brother Warren has. His wife Rhoda is beautiful, but often unserious and manipulative. Pug is stolid and career-obsessed, but unable to resist bucking conventional wisdom when he believes himself right. But the “War” novels became best-sellers, in part because Wouk has an excellent sense of character. Wouk’s writing is occasionally criticized as workmanlike the literary reviews were often dismissive. In addition, the decisive coordinated attack by American air forces was a “freak accident,” although one which would not have happened without the sacrifice of heroic young men. Wouk also sheds light on better-known events like the Battle of Midway, noting the code-breaking that gave America the intelligence advantage was aided by Japanese sloppiness after the Doolittle raid. But in both novels, Wouk draws an insightful portrait of the Russian people that remains useful to understanding their national psychology today. As Wouk notes in an aside, Soviet historians avoided highlighting the city’s three-year resistance of the Nazis due to the Communist Party’s failures to prepare for the German invasion (of which they were warned by multiple sources). For example, in “War and Remembrance,” Pug visits Leningrad after a brutal siege that reduced the population from 2,000,000 to 600,000. The journeys of Pug, his family, and their associates reach many less-known aspects of the war. Pug’s brushes with historical figures-Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill, to name a few-may give modern readers a Forrest Gump feeling, but there are historical examples of FDR using these sorts of emissaries.

As a result, Pug finds himself dispatched to Washington, London, Rome, Moscow, Tehran, and the Pacific.

The chief conceit of the books is that Pug, while serving as a naval attaché in Berlin, becomes an informal errand-runner for President Roosevelt. The families become connected when Pug’s youngest son Byron goes to work for Jastrow in Italy and falls in love with Jastrow’s niece, Natalie. naval officer, Victor “Pug” Henry, the other by a Jewish-American scholar and author, Aaron Jastrow (paralleling Wouk, Jastrow found popular success when his book, “A Jew’s Jesus,” became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection). The “War” novels are melodramas told through the lives of two families.

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