The Borrowed Years: 1938-1941 America On The Way To War

Of the years immediately preceding World War II, E.B. White wrote that they "were like the time you put in in a doctor's waiting room, years of fumbling with old magazines and unconfirmed suspicions, the ante years, the time of the moist palm and the irresolution." The picture Ketchum paints of the 1938-1941 period conveys just that sense of uncertainty and doubt and suspicion. The country was on the upswing from the Depression (though only the war would shake it off finally). The 1930s were a time of tremendous social and political change, at home and abroad, and Americans in 1938 were not as confident or optimistic, for good reason, as they had been in 1929 or as they would be in 1945. And then came the war. First abroad and then spreading to engulf the United States.Ketchum focuses largely on that story--how the United States dealt with its role in the world, or what exactly that role should be. These were years of intense debate, especially between isolationists and those who supported more active support for the Allies. Over time, the American people grew more supportive of intervention, but it took the shock of Pearl Harbor to draw the US into military involvement.Ketchum covers the gamut of American life in these years--culture, politics, society. The book is part history, but it is also part memoir. We get a sense of what it was like to be a young person in this period, to be among those who would be called upon to serve. Ketchum was a member of the Yale class of 1943, and his descriptions of life on campus and of the debates going on there were excellent and shed a new and interesting light on events.Highly recommended.

The book kept my interest up for the most part. After reading the book, I was able to get into extensive conversations with my parents who had lived in that era. In a nutshell the book explains that Roosevelt and Churchill understood the Nazi threat like few others.

The Borrowed Years is superb history. It is the very model of historical narrative. The whole sweep of events from Munich to Pearl Harbor is here - political, social, military, etc. His portrait of the big bands and of growing up in Pittsburgh, among the priveleged set, in the mid- to late-1930s registers true, as do his portarits of Roosevelt, Wilkkie, Lindbergh, Marshall, and the rest.His descriptions of Hitler at Nuremberg (sic) and Morrow in London during the Blitz are spellbinding. Ditto his narrative of Orson Welles and the night the aliens "invaded" New Jersey and scared America half to death. It's hard not to enjoy and savor The Borrowed Years.