The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

The Unwomanly Face of War is time-machine history: it's not concerned with why events happened, it explains what it felt like to live through them. Or as Nobel laureate Alexievich puts it much more Russianly, "I'm a historian of souls." For decades, she collected the memories of Soviet women who served as medics, snipers, cooks, mechanics, and partisans during their Great Patriotic War (WWII), sensing that the stories would reveal a truth buried under historical hagiography after the Victory. She took her raw recordings and by layering voices and echoing details created a theme and variations with an inevitable momentum. And while showing that women's war experience differed from men's in material ways, she also uncovers a more powerful idea: that women felt the same anger, fear, and sadness all combatants did—they just were woman enough to admit it.