| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939–1946. By Wesley Phillips Newton. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. xxx, 321 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8173-1043-6.)

This is an engrossing book, bursting with lively anecdotes and personal stories. It reconstructs, as few other books have, the wartime scene in an urban place. To read Wesley Phil-lips Newton's "portrait of a southern city" is to discover how Montgomerians, black and white, experienced World War II and how they, as citizens and as soldiers, dealt with wartime dangers, anxieties, and losses. The book is particularly effective at linking the home front to the battlefront, in personalizing the war by connecting the stories of those left behind to those overseas. Not a modest achievement! Enough, surely, to earn Montgomery in the Good War a place on the growing shelf of valuable World War II home-front studies.

That much said, however, the book will also very likely disappoint and frustrate scholars who expect a war-and-society book rather than the up front and the personal and who believe that narration and analysis are not mutually exclusive endeavors. The dust jacket promises a book that will explain how "a sleepy southern capital ... was transformed irreversibly during World War II," a transformation the book does not explain. In fact, it succeeds neither as a personal account nor as a historical analysis of a capital city in wartime. Allen Cronenberg's introduction characterizes the book as an "important case study" of a city in flux and then suggests that Newton shows how wartime exigencies wrought profound (and presumably enduring) change in Montgomery, the seat of government for a "radically changed Alabama" (pp. xv, xvii). Again, Newton offers something different.

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