As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story

by Emma Sweeney

Book Overview

A touching, true love story that captures the spirit of a generation and a love that endures, as a daughter learns about her lost father through the love letters he wrote her mother while at war.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316758582
• ISBN13: 9780316758581
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.3"
• Age Range: 13 years and up

Customer Reviews

Fall in Love with Jack and Beebe

When I first heard of As Always, Jack, I came here to learn more about it. Upon discovering it to be a slender volume of love letters, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it, and I couldn't wait. I opened the book to the first page sample page, and before I finished the third, I was already choked up and had tears in my eyes. It was Emma Sweeney's sense of loss and longing that evoked my sympathy. Bereavement is difficult enough for adults to live with, but Emma was only ten years old when she was finally able to grieve for the father she would never know. I could empathize with her need to find any little scrap of information about him, to have any little thing to cling to, and how that desire became a driving force in her life. I commiserated with her proneness to idealize him, and her eventual adult awareness that he was the one person who would never, could never, hurt or disappoint her. He would always be perfect. His image would never tarnish. I suspect that sharing her father with the world helped to bring a measure of completeness to her life. I knew it would be a wonderful book because it was easy to see it was a labor of love. While reading Emma's poignant introduction to the love letters her father wrote to her mother, Beebe, while they were separated during WWII, I expected the book to be bittersweet and full of longing. Instead, his letters are filled with the joyous certainty of a young man head over heels in love with a beautiful blonde he met at a dance just days before he shipped out. I probably noticed different things about Jack than others did because I saw him through an astrologer's eyes: he was an Aquarian whose life was archetypical of the sign. He made a career of aviation, liked to read his horoscope, had a quirky sense of humor, and an uncanny ability to see into the future. Even in death he was enigmatic, having disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. His last letter to Beebe stunned and left me tearful, full of wondering. Fortunately for us, and thanks to their daughter's love, Jack and Beebe Sweeney will live on forever.

a simple story that packs a complex wallop

Sometimes I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I'd like to meet. With only one plot, so I don't have to remember who's who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive. Not an easy book to find. So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short --- 179-page --- book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew. The 45 letters tell of Jack's courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii. What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child --- Emma. It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died --- and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation. These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I've never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn't I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that's happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe's letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of these letters --- you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy. Within five months, he's closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe --- people who believe that when two people are married, they're the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn't laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did. The letters pile up, then stop abruptly --- for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack's return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956

Did you ever see a dream walking?

Did you ever wish you could meet the perfect man, the kind of man who has a sense of humour, who is intelligent, who talks about his feelings, and who writes you the kind of love letters that not only make you feel gooier than a marshmallow but also restore your faith in all mankind? Well, Jack IS that man! As I read his letters, I couldn't help but fall wholeheartedly in love with him. In fact, I don't think any woman could read this and not fall in love with Jack. He's even dreamier than a year's worth of the R.E.M. stage of sleep. Jack should have been a writer, if only he'd lived long enough. He had the gift of the gab in spades. His letters, written off the cuff, are better than the writing you find in books that writers have spent years refining and rewriting. But most of all, Jack is a true romantic. Seriously, I think this is about the best love story I have ever read. If you have a soft spot in your heart for true romance, if you like nothing more than a love story, then all I can say is READ THIS BOOK! And the best thing about it is, Jack's not fictitious. He really lived. Knowing that there really are men like this in the world, who aren't just invented by some writer of fiction, will really gladden your heart, just as it did mine. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is definitely in my list of top ten books of all time.

Captures the heart, one letter at a time

Wow! I just finished reading this book and I can't even begin to describe how touching a beatiful this story is. What makes it even better is that it is all true. Even though you read mostly from Jack Sweeney's letters, you learn about both Jack, and Beebe in them. His letters made me laugh and makes you feel the same angst that he was feeling at not being able to be where his sweetheart is. The most incredible was the last letter of the book. It truly makes me believe, as it did with the author's mother, that the good Lord did indeed provide a way for Jack to say his last words as well as provide comfort to his family. This story is inspiring and shows what pure love is like as well as the more innocent and sweet times of the 1940s and 50s. I must admit that I keep thinking of the author and wishing that she, too, had the chance to know this man who sounds like a wonderful husband and father.

Best Book I Have Ever Read

This book is awesome!!! Jack is the most amazing man you will ever meet, even if it is only through his letters and his daughter's words. His letters were romantic, moving, funny, and inspiring. Every woman should read this book if for no other reason that to see an example of how she deserves to be treated and loved. This book is absolute perfection.