Not So Wild a Dream. Eric Sevareid.

Not So Wild a Dream
Eric Sevareid
New York: Atheneum. 1976 (1946).

Why read it? Autobiography. To those who heard and watched him on TV or read him in his newspaper columns, Eric Sevareid expressed himself concisely and memorably. He never wasted a word. One of his prominent traits was irony. This book helps people who are not familiar with Eric Sevareid to learn from him again. Most of this book describes his experiences in WWII.

Ideas. Norman Corwin: Brotherhood is not so wild a dream. The Negro Revolution was not so much a flight from poverty as from anonymity. p. xvii. Maturity cannot pass on its lessons from experience, thus assuring that the idealism of youth continues, learning from trial and error. p, xvii. "Hippie," "honky," "pig," etc. may be reviled because he is no longer a person but a symbol. p, xviii. Only democracy has the confidence and stability to expose and face its own blunders. p. xix. Man's mind is the last riddle. p. xx. It takes courage to doubt in a world of passionate certainties. p. xx.

I think my generation lived only for WWII. p. 10. Team spirit is not a joke. It won a war for my country. p. 13. The danger point of spirit, when a trifle becomes the occasion for an explosion. p. 23. Ideals are a reality for some people. p. 54. Preparedness was no guarantee of peace, but would be a force for easier involvement. p. 61. Military men hate war because they know what it is like. p. 63. Naive belief that truth cannot lose in the end. p. 64. I naively believed that truth could defeat a Hitler. p. 67. New York is the most anonymous city in the world. p. 76.

"The tragedy of war is not in the dead nor in the living; it is in the living dead." p. 124. To sit in a dank cellar holding tight to children who cry with fright at the look in their parents' eyes while droning planes like a million bees fill the sky. p. 145. "The terrifying violence of bombs nearby, how they stunned the mind, ripped the nerves and turned one's limbs to water." p. 160. "Germany was totally organized for war, every man, every wheel directed to war in a way that had no equal in modern times." p. 161.

These ideas are a sampling of what you will find in Sevareid's Not So Wild a Dream.

Quote: "In Velva [North Dakota] and everywhere the folks are the same except for this: that a boy from Velva, who...swam in the brown river and saw the rim of the world along the horizon of the prairie, now lies buried in a place called Anzio of which his sixth-grade geography book showed no pictures."