Peter Clenott

Nora Percival's third memoir completes a trilogy about a woman's life during three significant spans of her long lifetime. It recaptures the arduous days of World War II, when civilians in America were focused on defending our way of life against the brutal tyranny of Nazism. As she delineates her role in the national emergency, the sympathetic reader follows her vicissitudes and the drastic dislocations suffered by so many women in wartime. The author's challenging job, in a large defense plant producing vital war materiel, broke new ground. In planning this book, Percival turned to her daily reports, still in her files. "Rereading them after more than 65 years," the narrator writes, "those hectic, pressured days that demanded all my stamina, ingenuity, empathy and endurance rose up in my memory." Woven into her chapters, these reports provide a vivid portrait of the trials and triumphs of women's private battles. It was her concern for the unhappily divided state of our present world that impelled Percival to write of a time when Americans were united, all working together to save our country from Hitler's despotic assault.