Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest

by Kathy Hogan, Klancy Clark De Nevers, Lucy Hart

Hogan, Kathy, De Nevers, Klancy Clark, Hart, Lucy

290 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Nancy Schielmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cohassett Beach Chronicles is mainly a collection of articles written during WWII by a woman living near Westport, WA. They document life on a homefront that was perhaps more vulnerable to coastal attack than most of us today are aware of, and give a clear – and often amusing – picture of what rationing and government bureaucracy meant in the day-to-day existence of the common folk. Sometimes, not much, and the rose-colored glasses are definitely missing. Stop trying to find realism in fiction, and read this instead - it's fascinating!

The last article included that muses on the end of the war holds a lesson we can learn from today: that it takes time to return to what we once thought of as normal, and that it will probably never really return to what it was. The essence of life, which is what this book is really all about.

The articles are in order of publication, and are accompanied by a running timeline down the margins of the book that detail what was going on in the nation and in the war during that month. I think I learned more about WWII just by reading this bit of nostalgia than I did in all the history classes I took in school.