Title: My two wars
First published: 1996
Description: 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 narrative account ever written of an imperfect and fragile human soul caught up in the air war over Germany.".

But it is Thomsen's other war - his lifelong and monumental battle with his father - which begins and ends the book and makes My Two Wars one of the most outrageous and memorable father-andson stories ever told. Even late in his life, long after his father's death, Thomsen can lament: "I begin to write about him and find my body trembling with fifty year old angers. Old emotions still cramp my fingers; old injustices still march through my dreams."
Subjects: Aerial operations, American, American Aerial operations, American Personal narratives, Biography, Bombardiers, Personal narratives, American, United States, United States. Army, World War, 1939-1945, World war, 1939-1945, personal narratives, Bomber pilots
Places: United States
People: Charles Thomsen (d. 1959), Moritz Thomsen
LC classification: D790 .T518 1996