David Nichols (1)

If you want to understand World War II from the perspective of the average soldier, you read Ernie Pyle's dispatches from the war, collected in "Ernie's War". If you want a perspective on America during the Depression that you may have missed in the history books, this is as good as it gets. From 1935 to 1942 Ernie traveled throughout America, reporting in his column on the people and places he met. People made reading his column a daily habit, fascinated with where he had been and whom he had met. This was in the days before interstate highways made cross-country travel a commonality.

Pyle was a master at unearthing the fascinating behind every person or place he met, but he also ran across well-known people or those who had crossed their lives, including Judge Roy Bean, Billy the Kid, Dr. George W. Carver, Sam Houston, Jesse James, Casey Jones, Huey Long, Will Rogers and Mark Twain. And there is a fascinating little story from my home town, Westerville, Ohio, featuring Pyle's meeting with Howard Russell, the lawyer-turned-evangelistic prohibitionist who founded the Anti-Saloon League and was the driving and guiding force behind the Eighteenth Amendment, that gave America fourteen years of prohibition.… (more)