Book: Not So Wild a Dream

Overview
Eric Sevareid’s Not So Wild a Dream is a wartime memoir and coming‑of‑age narrative that traces a young American’s passage from the prairies of the Upper Midwest to the nerve centers and margins of World War II. First published in 1946, it combines eyewitness reporting with reflective self‑scrutiny, mapping the collapse of Europe, the resilience of London, the muddle of North Africa and Italy, and the hazards of Asia, all while interrogating the burdens and ethics of journalism in an age of catastrophe.

Prairie beginnings and a calling to news
Sevareid opens on the Dakota‑Minnesota frontier of his Norwegian‑American childhood, evoking small‑town textures, family discipline, and a restless appetite for the wider world. The Depression years harden that appetite into intention. Student radicalism, newsroom apprenticeships, and a youthful taste for risk, memorialized in the canoe journey to Hudson Bay, serve as initiation rites into observation, endurance, and skepticism. By the mid‑1930s he has made his way to Europe, turning a reporter’s eye on a continent in fever.

Europe in crisis and the fall of France
Paris becomes his proving ground. He watches the erosion of the Third Republic through cabinet crises, class tensions, and the numbing advance of surrender talk. The German invasion brings a season of flight, improvisation, and moral ambiguity. Sevareid’s dispatches capture the dread on train platforms, the clogged roads of refugees, the shabby theater of collaboration, and the quiet heroism of people who choose decency when institutions fail. From there he moves to London and the circle of Murrow’s correspondents, absorbing the city’s nightly courage under the Blitz and refining a voice at once factual and humane.

North Africa, Italy, and the ambiguities of “liberation”
With the American landings in North Africa he enters a thicket of allied rivalries and bureaucratic half‑truths. He observes the uneasy dance among Vichy remnants, Free French factions, American commanders, and censors determined to regulate what the public may know. Sicily and Italy add the texture of battlefield proximity: mud, exhaustion, the cunning of survival, and the ordinary soldier’s unadvertised gallantry. He weighs victory’s aftertaste, how liberation entangles itself with opportunism, how ideals abrade against the grain of necessity.

Asia and the fall through the sky
Transferred to the China‑Burma‑India theater, Sevareid confronts a different scale of remoteness and risk. A transport flight over jungle mountains fails, and he parachutes into the green void. Days with hill tribes and clandestine allies become a study in reliance and humility: the slow arithmetic of hunger, leeches, rumors of patrols, and the patient courage of guides who know the paths out. Rescued and returned to the airwaves, he measures the thin line between a story told and a life that could easily have ended wordless.

Democracy, disillusion, and the work of truth
Threaded through the itinerary is an argument about citizenship and the press. Sevareid admits youthful flirtations with ideological certainties, the temptations of cynicism, and the compressions of wartime censorship. He insists that truth is not a blunt instrument but a responsibility, precision without cruelty, skepticism without contempt, sympathy without gullibility. He argues that democracy, to survive, needs candor more than comfort and that a more generous, adult America is within reach if it can outgrow provincialism and fear.

Style, scope, and enduring resonance
The prose is lucid, unsentimental, and quietly lyrical, moving from street‑level detail to moral inference without grandstanding. Portraits of colleagues, soldiers, refugees, and officials are rendered with compressed intimacy. The title signals his final wager: that the hope for a steadier, kinder public life, tempered by what he has seen of collapse and endurance, is not so wild a dream. The book stands as both a record of a correspondent’s war and a testament to the hard work of keeping faith with facts and with people when the world tilts.