Audiobook Review: Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow

Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow is a World War II story of extraordinary grit, read by Edward Herrmann, reviewed by Star Lawrence

My father served as a doctor on a destroyer off Iwo when the flag went up. My daughter’s father was in Laos and North Vietnam, not even South Vietnam, in the special forces in 1965. Both talked very little about it.

In Ordinary Heroes, Scott Turow tries to explore his own father’s experiences in World War II in a fictionalized form. His father, he says, in an interview afterward on disk, stopped talking about war when Turow entered his teen years—at that point, his father was talked out and had achieved whatever peace or compartmentalization or whatever he was trying to get or had given up on it. “What percent of what people tell us do we understand?” Turow says he once asked a professor. About 10%, they concluded.

The construct for this story is a son trying to find out why his father, a lawyer with the Judge Advocate General’s office in France, was almost executed in France for letting a dashing American OSS officer go when the latter was suspected of spying for the Russians at the end of World War II.

It is also a story of how Stewart Dubinsky’s father met his mother. The son had always been told, rather vaguely, that they met when his father entered a concentration camp, that she had been an inmate lucky enough to survive the horrors. But no.

This is a mystery, a love story, and a grim, horrid story of the ravages of war and madness.

Edward Herrmann handles the voices well, including the French/Polish accent of the beguiling resistance fighter Gita, who steals the book as Turow notes in his interview..

Not really “ordinary.” But heroes, yes. Maybe “Quiet Heroes,” would have been a better title.

Star Lawrence is a medical writer and reporter based in Chandler, AZ. Her other reviews and ramblings can be found on http://chandlerazoo.blogspot.com.