My two wars

by Moritz Thomsen

Moritz Thomsen's My Two Wars describes the great battles in his life - one against a rich, tyrannical father; the other against anti-aircraft gunners over Germany in 1943 and 1944. Thomsen was a gifted and original writer and a genuine American rebel. In his late-forties, he cast his lot with the poor, joined the Peace Corps, and was sent to Ecuador where he lived as an expatriate for the next twenty-eight years and chronicled his life in four remarkable books that have been compared with the work of Thoreau and Joseph Conrad. My Two Wars was completed shortly before Thomsen's death, and with it he concluded the story of his unusual life. In this final book he returns to his youth growing up in a wealthy Seattle household with the father he despised, and goes off to the war in Europe as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force. Thomsen's writing about the war evokes Joseph Heller's famous novel in its poignancy and hilarity, and in his introduction Page Stegner calls it "the best narrati