IR Approved: ★★★★★ A family historian pieces together the life and loss of his great-uncle through decades of preserved correspondence, creating an intimate portrait of one American family’s World War II experience. SEARCHING FOR HAROLD: One Family’s World War II Story in Letters is, at its heart, an act of remembrance. …
A Golden Quill Read: ★★★★★ Every letter carried hope. Every silence carried unimaginable fear and loss. Some books about the Second World War seek to explain the conflict through battles, political decisions or military strategy. Others choose a more intimate path, revealing history through the ordinary lives caught within extraordinary …
★★★★½ An epistolary memoir of a fractured family in the throes of World War II, Searching for Harold: One Family’s World War II Story in Letters by Stephen Watts presents a stirring and timely picture of unity, support, and grace under fire. Primarily comprised of letters exchanged between members of the Carleton …
Verdict: “Get it.” U.S. Air Force veteran Watts offers a microhistory of World War II, as told through his family’s correspondence. When the author inherited his family’s archive of wartime letters, written during the 1930s and ’40s, he saw the collection as “both a gift and an obligation,” believing that …
Production Grades: Cover A-; design and topography A; editing A; marketing copy A. For the Carleton and Watts families, every letter received during World War II revealed the status of a husband, father, uncle, or brother. In his intimate memoir, Watts shares his family history through the words of his …
★★★ Diaristic and revealing, the family memoir in letters Searching for Harold proffers insights into people’s wartime thoughts. Stephen Watts’s family memoir Searching for Harold reconstructs daily life during World War II via vintage letters. In covering several years leading up to the war, the war itself, and the aftermath, many voices are heard, …
A genuine, textured portrait of a family on the front lines and home fronts of WWII. Searching for Harold: One Family’s World War II Story in Letters is Stephen Watts’s second venture into epistolary family history. Watts’s comfort with genealogy is evident in his treatment of the sizable correspondence of …
Harold Watts, the author’s great uncle, enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII, became a corporal, and was killed in action in Germany in 1944. This book tells his story, and that of his extended family, through letters sent by and to various family members. The book first outlines the …