The war

Gr 9 Up-Ken Burnss compelling new series is a definitive document of Americas involvement in the Second World War. It focuses on the experiences of participants on both the home front and on the battle front, particularly centering on Americans from four towns: Luverne, MN; Waterbury, CT; Mobile, AL; and Sacramento, CA. From the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, the series brings to life a pivotal era of American history with period music, still photographs, clips from movie reels including American wartime propaganda, and combat footage that aptly depicts the grisly horrors of war. Each headline and every battle is depicted in chronological order, which tells the story as it unfolded in the American experience. There are no interviews with historians or military analysts--we hear only the voices of Americans who experienced combat in the North-African, European, and Pacific theaters. American civilians also share their experiences of the wars impact, including women who joined the American workforce for the first time in defense jobs, children who collected scrap metal for the war effort, and Japanese-American families forced to relocate from the western United States to internment camps. Other accounts are read by actors such as Tom Hanks and Samuel L. Jackson. The struggle for racial equality at home and in the military is shown through the experiences of African-American and Japanese-American soldiers; Italian-, Latino-, and Native-American experiences are documented as well.Keith Davids narration strikes a pitch-perfect tone to capture emotion in one sentence, then in the next to recite the grim statistics in an almost detached manner as history remembers it. Computer animations are used to show maps, an essential visual feature. It is Burnss concentration on the American experience that brings out the imperfections of this documentary. Very little time is spent to frame the war in a global perspective. Viewers learn little of the causes of the war, except that America entered when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The experiences of Americas primary allies, the Soviets and the British, are mostly skimmed over, resulting in a skewed picture of the war. Despite these minor flaws, this documentary ably meets its goal of capturing the experience of Americans during WWII. The decision to show this lengthy series in a classroom environment is not one to be made lightly. There are frequent images of graphic violence, including amputations, decapitations, burned corpses, people dead from starvation, frozen cadavers, and the catastrophic horrors of the Holocaust, including full frontal nudity. Adult language is used as well; in the first few minutes of Episode 5 the f-word is used twice, an MPAA criterion for an R-rating of a motion picture. This excellent educational resource, a top-notch documentary in terms of information and production values, is most appropriate for students in the upper grades of high school an above.-Ryan Henry, Daviess County Public Library, Owensboro, KY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.