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Country Doctor: The Story of Dr. Claire Louise Caudill. By Shirley Gish. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999. 168 pp. Hardbound $22.50.

Music is well-covered with a chapter all to itself, with detailed comparisons of the singer Vera Lynn and pianist Myra Hess, and frequent quotations from interviews. Other cultural areas get shorter shrift. Film gets a passing mention, while theater is hardly touched. Literature is dismissed as being barely present. In fact, an effort was made to continue publication of books, albeit in cheap wartime editions, and various poets and writers were active at the time, including John Betjamin and Graham Greene. (The latter was an ambulance driver during the worst of the Blitz.) My own father's favorite account of culture in the war years was seeing Dame Margot Fonteyn dance while he was a student in Cambridge. The legacy of this dark time and the long shadow it has cast over more recent history is described in the concluding chapter. The cultural change wrought by the war years is given full justice but not exaggerated. Whistling in the Dark is an interesting book on a fascinating subject but for the reader it may in the end be less than fully satisfying. Each chapter begins with several pages of discussion of method, background, and theory. While interesting to the historian, not all of this is relevant, and it is in strong contrast to the descriptive heart of each chapter. I was also uncomfortable with the ways in which interviewees' comments were characterized, or the author's words substituted, rather than being allowed to stand for themselves. Ultimately, the book is one that welldeserved to be written but could have been better served by an author who emphasized the testimony of the people she interviewed. When the facts and the people are allowed to speak, the book comes vigorously to life.