That Mad Game: Growing Up in a Warzone: An Anthology of Essays from Around the Globe (review)

In her introduction to this anthology of autobiographical accounts of childhood experiences of war, Powers notes that the world has seen at least 160 wars since 1945, and children are more likely to experience war during their lifetime than not. In these seventeen essays, most of them original to the collection, writers (almost all adult writers whose names will be new to young readers) recount their childhood and young adulthood experiences during wars in which they lost their homelands, their dreams, and their innocence. Historical facts and context set the stage for the personal stories, which range from experiences in the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. and the occupation of Holland during World War II, to personal and secondhand accounts of Vietnam from a soldier and the son of a soldier, to life in exile during the Cultural Revolution in China, to the ongoing unrest in Burma, among others. There is a riveting and revealing story of a pair of city boys who befriend a member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and an account by a couple who have decided to rear their two young children in Juarez, Mexico, despite the fact that drug cartels have turned their city into a war zone. The stories are emotionally exhausting in their unflinching brutality, and thus perhaps best parsed out over time as teachers introduce students to the various conflicts. However, rich, detailed accounts like these of the displacement of war and its lingering effect on memories are essential to helping teens put a human face on tragedies that often seem too distant in both time and geography to grasp. These essays give readers a front-row seat to the hunger, the hardship, and, ultimately, the resilience of people whose childhoods were forever marked by life on the front lines.