Alison Lurie Quotes
There is a peculiar burning odor in the room, like explosives. the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun.
Lurie, Alison. The War Between the Tates. Random House, 1974.
At first reading, this is just a common report of a German war correspondent riding along on a bombing mission. However what makes it a very important historical quotation is the description of the fires and the date. In WWII the allies firebombed Hamburg {624722} and Dresden, and were then accused by the Germans—and by some historical revisionists in the 21st century—of bombing civilian cities and using the firbombing technique where one huge conflagrant sucked the air out of the area and roasted even people in bomb shelters. However, it was clear that the Germans had started the bombing of civilian cities, but the firebombing was less clear. This quotation proves that it was the Germans who first broke the rules of war and that made the subsequent Allied use of the technique legal and for most people then moral.
Alison Stewart Lurie was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
