The Soldier's Truth

March 27, 2023
In this intriguing and admiring biography, Chrisinger (Stories Are What Save Us), director of writing seminars for The War Horse, retraces war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s steps through the European and Pacific theaters of WWII. Born and raised in Indiana, Pyle innovated a new style of war reporting by focusing less on geopolitics and strategy and more on “what he called the soldiers’ ‘worm’s eye view.’ ” From digging his own foxhole on the front lines in North Africa, to eye-witnessing the Normandy landings and the invasion of Okinawa, Pyle’s reports humanized U.S. soldiers for readers at home, while simultaneously exposing the muddy, violent, and often useless nature of war. According to Chrisinger, Pyle managed to both “maintain morale and stir up the American public to do all they could to help finish the fighting so that their boys could finally come home.” By the time he was killed by a sniper on Okinawa in 1945, Pyle had achieved critical and financial success, though his long absences from home exacerbated his wife’s “bipolar disorder” and Pyle himself worried that he would “crack wide open and become a real case of war neurosis.” Chrisinger’s deep admiration for his subject comes through, as does his belief in the power of storytelling as a force for good. It’s a fascinating portrait of a reporter who gave everything to get the story.

April 15, 2023
The World War II career of America's most popular war journalist. In 1944, with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt and his column circulating to more than 14 million readers, Ernie Pyle (1900-1945) was exhausted. He was ready to return from liberated France to his ailing wife and the seclusion of the New Mexico desert. However, the war drew him back in, and he died during the American landing on Ie Shima. Chrisinger, a writing instructor and author of Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor's Guide to Writing About Trauma, illuminates the approach to reporting that won Pyle so many fans but cost him his life. The author shows how Pyle captured "the average guy's picture of the war" by living among soldiers, collecting their stories, and relaying them to his readers in immersive detail. Though he shows that Pyle's journalism was not without detractors--Arthur Miller thought it too focused on "the boys who make homes in foxholes" and not enough on the war's "meaning"--Chrisinger does not comment directly on Pyle's merit. Instead, he puts his writing into context for modern readers, providing "the stories beneath the stories Ernie told his readers" and the wider-angle accounts of troop movements and battles that Pyle typically left out. Moreover, the author provides ample quotations from Pyle's columns, showing us a portion of what wartime readers would have seen: a pilot trapped in his downed plane calmly smoking a cigarette and waiting for whatever came next; a soldier taking cover in an Italian cowshed and musing on the best way to keep his son out of the next war; the ride into Paris in August 1944 ("they tossed flowers and friendly tomatoes into your jeep"). Displaying Pyle's detailed snapshots of victory, levity, fatigue, death, and grief, Chrisinger leaves his readers free to form their own conclusions about Pyle's journalistic achievements. The compelling story of "America's most beloved war correspondent," who lost his life recording soldiers' real experiences.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
Chrisinger, who teaches writing at the University of Chicago and contributes to the War Horse, a nonprofit newsroom covering the human impact of military service, delivers a fine account of legendary reporter Ernie Pyle, who, as a hugely popular columnist for Scripps-Howard during WWII, commanded an audience of some 14 million readers among 500 publications. Chrisinger teases out the exquisite, often painful balancing act Pyle had to perform as a war correspondent; he wrote around military censors while pounding out hard-nosed battle reportage, expressed the senselessness and tragedy of combat while reassuring the American public that all was not lost, reported on the privations endured by the soldiers while suffering them himself, and comforted an increasingly untethered wife waiting for him Stateside, even as he teetered on the edge of insanity and despair on battlefields in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France (D-Day), and, finally, the Pacific. And he did it all while always somehow taking inspiration and ennoblement from the humble American GI. An excellent reassessment of a singular American journalist.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.