V IS FOR VICTORY

A scrapbook of images from the war years, with entertaining commentary, and full of (mostly) b&w photographs, posters, and banners arranged in colorful, inventive ways (titled, faded, overlapping, tinted, and with the text superimposed). Krull (One Nation, Many Tribes, p. 227, etc.) has created the kind of book that begins wherever readers happen to open to first. The war is viewed principally from a US perspective: Of the ten chapters, four are exclusively about America (Pearl Harbor, the home front, the US Army, and the Japanese-American internment camps). The other chapters cover the events leading up to the war, its history, the Holocaust, the major personalities, weapons, and long-range effects of the war—all with a familiar slant, relying on those images that penetrated the popular imagination during the war, and since. Readers may find themselves yearning for the pre- Vietnam days when all wars were good wars—the bigger, the better- -with clear-cut moral stands. A handsome coffee-table book, its retro look matching its retro take on the war. (chronology, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10+)