What’s here and what’s not? An opening question to make the anthologist’s heart sink. It does, however, have particular relevance here because Mordecai Richler’s intention is to produce a mosaic of World War II, a picture produced “by cementing together small pieces . . . of various colours,” pieces varying in size from a couple of paragraphs to twenty-odd pages, with the final “big picture” looking “something like a group novel that would tell the story from the invasion of Poland to the signing of the peace treaty on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay,” and also “illuminate what it was like for the other side, yesterday’s enemies.”

Given such aims, the venture was one in which balance was more than usually important, and it is certainly not achieved. This is overwhelmingly an Anglo-American anthology. There are contributors from a dozen other countries, but the amount of space they occupy is less than a third of the book. And the illumination from the other side is almost wholly an illusion, since nearly all of it comes from such witnesses as Marie Vassiltchikov, stranded in Berlin at the outbreak of war, several of whose friends were involved in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The few exceptions include a long incoherent piece by Céline about his flight in 1944 from the advancing Allies, and some remarkable last letters written by Japanese Kamikaze pilots. There is nothing that gives a direct view of the War as experienced by