A.J. Liebling’s perspectives on life during war

Mollie and Other War Pieces

By A.J. Liebling

University of Nebraska Press, 286 pages, $15.95 paper

War was the dominant theme in New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling’s life from October 1939 through 1944. This collection is less about the cruelty of war than the contradictory and complicated emotional elements of it, reflecting a nostalgia for some parts of what Liebling describes as a war that was “so disgusting, so deplorable, so human.”