Knopf Preempts WWII Nurses' Tales
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 1/7/2002
Seven publishers were interested in the project, but Knopf's Jane Garrett forestalled an auction for a huge book about the role of American army nurses in World War II with a "handsome" preemptive bid that took it off the table. It has the rather unwieldy title of And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in WWII and the Wounded Soldiers They Cared For, from the First D-Day Invasions in North Africa to the Surrender of Germany. The authors, Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Niedle-Greenlee, interviewed dozens of surviving wartime nurses for their firsthand accounts of events and activities seldom covered in books about the war mainly because after the war many of the nurses married, changed their names and were difficult to trace. One revelation in the book, for instance, is that nurses actually went ashore with the troops in the North Africa landings but never again after that. Garrett bought world rights from agent Mary M. Tahan at Clausen, Mays & Tahan, and plans to publish in fall 2003.
