Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War by Dale Maharidge

 Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War
by Dale Maharidge

This book describes the authors relationship with his father. Troubled as it was by the events of World War II. After his death he did what he could to research his unit and why he was affected. The research is pretty much the narrative of the book. We do get discussions about military actions but they are fragmentary and he doesn't bother coalescing them into one larger narrative. Since I usually read more traditional military history I found this to be frustrating.

Clearly Maharidge has quite a bit of anger most of it leveled at the decision-makers in the Pacific campaign. He finds Admiral Nimitz personally responsible for his dads PTSD. Intellectually I think this is a hard case to make. In the section on PTSD he doesn't acknowledge that the research shows that everyone has a breaking point at some point.

I found the research impressive and the writing is very good. If you treat this more as a memoir and biography that a military history then you'll get more from it.

Recommended for anyone interested in the effects of the war on the generation that followed.


This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.