In the 1990s I knew a man called Fred Bonnie, a writer and an academic who had a vision for the revival of his friend Erskine Caldwell’s many unjustly-neglected mid-century works. Sadly, Fred died in a one-car crash before any of these plans could be brought to fruition.

I approached this read, then, in sympathy with the politics and the art of both leads. I had hoped for an insight into the couple’s life together and their shared goals, with lots of photos. I got instead a thorough travelogue, a relatively few...forty-two to be exact...photos, and a pretty academically dry assessment of the enterprise of reporting from the front lines of WWII’s scariest front, that in Russia.

It is, of course, not the book’s fault I wanted something I did not get. I felt, not unreasonably I believe, that the marketing of the book...see the publisher’s synopsis...led me to expect that book. I got a very worthwhile academic consideration of a stressful and productive time in the careers of two titans of early twentieth-century leftist culture.