Margaret Halsey (1910-1997) was a very popular writer in her day, and even one of the earliest recipients of the National Book Award. She wanted to write this book, published in 1944 (the year I was born), as non-fiction, since it is largely based on her personal experience as a hostess in a NYC canteen for servicemen during WWII. However, her publisher and others close to her dissuaded her, due to the book's subject: racism and antisemitism as she witnessed it, in a time when such practices were still very common, and, for the most part, overlooked or even condoned. So she wrote her story as "a kind of novel," in an epistolary format with its heroine, Gretchen, twenty-six and divorced, keeping house for her widowed father, relating her daily activities at home and at work in a mostly very light-hearted manner, to her older brother, Jeff, a scientist who'd been drafted and sent to Fort Bragg, where he runs afoul of some Southern "white supremacists.' (Yes, she even calls them that, and this nearly eighty years ago.) In fact, her title, SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE SOLDIERS, is probably a not-so-gentle jab at the complacency and hypocrisy of so many of her supposedly enlightened white friends.

There are nods to rationing and housing shortages of the era, but prejudice is center stage for most of the story, and it is sad how little has changed in that regard in the past eighty years. Halsey is a decent writer, although I found her unrelenting attempts to be constantly witty and clever off-putting and even annoying.

Long out of print, but a quick read and still a rather interesting artifact of the wartime era.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )