The Whirligig of Time: A Memoir of Civilian Life in America During World War II
About this ebook
during three significant spans of her long lifetime. It recaptures the
arduous days of World War II, when civilians in America were focused on
defending our way of life against the brutal tyranny of Nazism. As she
delineates her role in the national emergency, the sympathetic reader
follows her vicissitudes and the drastic dislocations suffered by so
many women in wartime.
The author's challenging job, in a large defense plant producing
vital war materiel, broke new ground. In planning this book, Percival
turned to her daily reports, still in her files. "Rereading them after
more than 65 years," the narrator writes, "those hectic, pressured days
that demanded all my stamina, ingenuity, empathy and endurance rose up
in my memory."
Woven into her chapters, these reports provide a vivid portrait of
the trials and triumphs of women's private battles. It was her concern
for the unhappily divided state of our present world that impelled
Percival to write of a time when Americans were united, all working
together to save our country from Hitler's despotic assault.
About the author
Nora Lourie Percival was born just after World War I in Samara on the Volga River in Russia. The revolution drove her father out of the country to safety, and her family lived through a civil war and a famine. These tribulations were recorded in Weather of the Heart, her first memoir. In 1922, the family was reunited in New York, where Nora grew up. The author’s career has been largely in the editorial field. She has worked for Random House, the American Management Association, and Barnard College. Now long retired, she is still writing and working as a freelance editor. An only child, she has raised five children and now has eleven grandchildren. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina, where she enjoys the natural beauty and is inspired by the literary renaissance in the South.
