A World History

This is a story about a guy and two gals, to use the vernacular of the novel. Wink returns from World War II with one functioning hand (not the one he draws with) and a concern about what to do with the rest of his life. His stopover in Chicago to deliver a message to a buddy's wife turns into a new career producing pin-up girl photos for GI magazines. Set in more innocent times, the romance that filters through the plot sounds down-to-earth and sometimes corny. So does the language. But the author offers a composite glimpse of life when posing suggestively as a pin-up girl was beyond the pale of the GIs and their brides who were settling down in the suburbs and the House Unamerican Activities Committee was hunting down "deviant" acts. Author Steve Amick knows a lot about black-and-white photography and what was needed to make photography an art in those pre-digital times. Sometimes he wants to tell the reader too much, to the detriment of the plot. But he still managed to keep me turning the pages and looking for his next book. Reviewed by Marj Stuart

I seldom buy new hardcover books, but after reading a review of "Nothing But a Smile" in People magazine, I was hooked. The book is written in the easy old style of a classic movie from the 1940s. I could easily see movie stars from that era playing the roles in the book. It's an old fashioned romance, and very well done. Amick is able to write from both the male and female perspectives easily and mostly believably. It's a little corny in spots, a little modern in others. It's a love story, but it's also a nice piece of historical fiction. You really do get absorbed into the lives of the characters and the emotions they must have felt living through the time they did. I don't know how much of Sal and Wink's story was based on real people, or if they came completely from Steve Amick's imagination. However, the poses, the photos, the card backs and other scenes were very clever, and you really do have to appreciate the creativity, regardless of the inspiration. For such risque content, the book is actually very wholesome. I almost gave this book four stars. The end seemed to wrap up at a much faster pace than the rest of the book. By the time you get to the last fifty pages, you're so involved with the characters you want to know the last details as much as you knew all the previous details of their lives. I feel Amick could have elaborated more, particularly in the epilogue. However, I feel that way about most great books I read, so I guess that means this was another great book. I left my rating at five stars if only because a book was finally written on this subject and it turned out almost exactly as I hoped it would be.

This book is just fabulous. It's smart, funny, sexy, and heartbreaking all wrapped up and splashed across roughly a hundred short chapters. It's a love story in a historical setting without being schmulzy. The characters are iconic of the time without losing their honesty, the prose and POV choices are clever, and the historical elements are great to watch play out. Amick has a great sense of relationships, how two people who know everything about each other can still be vulnerable to misreading the signs, and can write easily from the perspective of both a man and a woman. "Nothing But a Smile" is a great read!

I love this book. Steve Amick manages to strike a balance between nostalgia and honesty which is difficulty in this day and age -- and refreshing.

Well, first of all, I love the cover art of this book, but I also took the time to read the novel and adored it. Post-WWII Chicago comes vividly to life in Amick's beautiful prose. His attention to historic detail (watch for a cameo by a young man named "Hef") brings into sharp focus an era in which my own grandparents struggled their way into adulthood. Despite its historic setting, however, this is an uplifting tale about people who choose not only to survive, but also thrive, in one of the world's most difficult eras. Who among us today couldn't use a story like that in their lives?