Ordinary Heroes, by Scott Turow

When we nominated books for future Novel Conversations reading, my friend Kendall proposed a moratorium on World War II books. I agreed--and then somehow I picked up Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes. I obviously had looked too closely at the book, as I expected the usual Turow legal thriller. While the story has legal aspects--the main character, David Dubin, is a JAG attorney-- it's primarily a novel about World War II.

Turow uses a story within a story device. Stewart Dubinsky, a recently divorced journalist who retired to write a book, is stunned when he discovers, while going through his recently deceased father's papers, had been court-martialled during World War II and had jilted his fiancee. Stewart's mother will tell him nothing about his father's history, so he decides to use his journalistic skills to uncover his father's past. The bulk of the book is devoted to what he learns, with much less time devoted to how the knowledge of his father's war-time activities affected Stewart.

Although I plugged my way through the entire book, reading about battles and military strategy is not my thing. The twists the story takes are interesting, as are the changes in David's thinking as he experiences war first-hand, but the pluses are not enough to make me recommend this book to anyone who is not a WWII buff.

Favorite passage:

"Your father," she said, stopping to pick a speck of sugar off her tongue and to reconsider her words. Then, she granted the only acknowledgment she ever has of what I faced with him. "Stewart," she said, "your father sometimes had a difficult relationship with himself."