World War II
Although during the war the combined effects of paper rationing and unstable financing created new challenges, before Pearl Harbor the Press published books and pamphlets urging America to join the Allied effort. The problem with America, as Press Director Couch (1932-45) perceived it, was complacency. With the support of the Board and the backing of UNC President Frank Porter Graham, he made every effort to awaken the public to the threat of Nazism. In 1941, the Press published R. H. Markham's The Wave of the Past, a rebuttal to Anne Morrow Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future (1940), a best selling apology for Nazism. Largely due to Couch's superhuman efforts, Markham's pamphlet made the New York Times best seller list with no help from New York-based reviewers.
Bridge Across the PacificPublished on the tenth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima Diary (1955) received widespread attention, including cover stories in Look Magazine and the Saturday Review. The diary records Doctor Michihiko Hachiya's experiences in the weeks following the atomic bombing. Its translator, Dr. Warner Wells, taught at the University of North Carolina and met Hachiya while serving as surgical consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Hachiya and Wells used their royalties to establish a fund for the education of Japanese war orphans.
Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun (1957) recounts her experiences as the American wife of a Japanese diplomat during World War II. It chronicles her internment and repatriation to Japan, as well as her family's struggle to survive during the war. By emphasizing the heroic actions of her husband, who tried to prevent the bombing of Pearl Harbor and was instrumental in re-establishing diplomatic relations between Japan and America following the war, Terasaki puts a human face on the Japanese war experience. Bridge to the Sun was later adapted into a popular movie of the same name starring Carroll Baker.
The Holocaust
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque
Land (1985), translated by Roslyn Hirsch, edited by Eli Pfefferkorn
and David H. Hirsch, is a series of portraits, vignettes and tales based
on the author's experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz. In addition to
portraying the extremes of cruelty and nobility that co-existed in this
world, Nomberg-Przytyk, who was assigned to Josef Mengele's hospital,
provides a first-hand description of his appalling human experiments. The
American Library Association selected it as the Best Book for Young Adults
in 1986, and the International Center for Holocaust Studies awarded it the
1986 Merit of Educational Distinction.
In The Origins of Nazi Genocide (1995), Henry Friedlander describes how the Nazi program of euthanizing the mentally and physically handicapped before the war provided a model for the systematic murder of Gypsies and Jews during World War II. Its emphasis on euthanasia rather than anti-Semitism as an origin of the "final solution" is unique in Holocaust Studies and garnered it the 1996 Bruno Brand Award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
On to next exhibit case
Up to UNC Press exhibit home page
Up to UNC Press 75th
anniversary home page
Up to UNC Press Online