Two Young People Engulfed by a World War - an Editorial Review of "Both Sides of the Pond"

Book Blurb:

In January of 1939 when Barbara Greene, a beautiful and successful young British actress, met Joe Kennedy Jr., son of the American Ambassador, she could not have expected that their relationship would lead to her emigrating to America and piloting a plane around the eastern states to publicize Bundles for Britain, let alone her hasty decision to marry an American. Nor could her brother, Kent, have foreseen his bitter retreat from Dunkirk when he left England in January 1940 to fight in France, or his subsequent service in Cornwall, North Africa, Sicily, and Burma. Their stories portray the war on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and on the home front and battlefront.

In this intensively researched and highly readable story of war and love, we also hear the stories of other ordinary people who survived extraordinary circumstances. In the words of Evan Thomas, a New York Times best-selling author, “Both Sides of the Pond captures how awful and hard it was for this family to be caught up in the war, but also how it was, at moments, thrilling, meaningful, and romantic… For anyone who wants to know what it is really like to have your world turned upside down, read this book and be shocked, thrilled and moved. From heady and improbable love affairs amidst the falling bombs to the gritty deprivations of daily life, it’s all here in a timeless, well-told tale.”

Other authors note: “The war experienced by young actress Barbara Greene and her brother Kent revealed in this deeply researched and impressive family history will draw you in and keep you engaged.” (Robert Malcolmson, co-editor of many books and articles, including The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace.) “The description of the humiliating retreat through Dunkirk is the best I have ever read.” (Roy Martin, Master Mariner and author of Ebb and Flow: evacuations and landings by merchant ships in World War Two, and other books.) “This is a first-rate account of the build-up to World War II, a most descriptive account of the attack on Croydon and generally of the Blitz, that also includes a delightful passage on Warwick Castle.” (Brian Ingpen, the author of eight books on maritime history, including Mailships of the Union Castle Line.) “An intimate and beautifully researched story of one young British woman’s life as she finds love and a career on the stage and screen. When World War II destroys those dreams, she and her brother are called upon to serve their country in different but equally perilous ways. The author views historic events through this very personal lens in a way that brings Barbara and Kent’s compelling stories vividly to life for the reader.” (Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, author of Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies.)

Richly illustrated with photographs and documents, Both Sides of the Pond, My Family’s War is a captivating book that brings new insight into the lives of men and women who fought to defend our liberty.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/MEjHyFL

Author Bio:

Dr. Lawrence is the author of many articles and nine books, including an award-winning dissertation about the influence of culture on aspirations in Maine.A former professor, she has taught courses in anthropology and sociology, research, and writing non-fiction and memoir. Lawrence grew up in New York City and Washington D.C., then earned a BA in anthropology from Bennington College, an MA in sociology from New York University, and an Ed.D. in Administration, Policy and Planning from Boston University.

In addition to teaching, Lawrence has worked for the Department of Social Services and the Housing Development Administration in New York, directed a small museum in Maine, co-run a brokerage and construction company, consulted for the Rural School and Community Trust and KnowledgeWorks, started four non-profit organizations supporting the environment and students. When not working she loves to go on long walks. She lives in Maine and is doing research for the third novel in her Islands series.

Editorial Review:

There were moments in Barbara’s youth when she felt herself dissolve—quite willingly—into the soft outline of another life. To act was not merely to pretend; it was to slip, trembling and exhilarated, into some hidden chamber of the self. Thus, when the letter arrived—creased at the corners from its long journey yet shimmering with the promise of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art—she understood it as one understands a summons. The future, long distant and shimmering like heat on a summer road, seemed suddenly to incline toward her.

For a time she lived inside that shimmer. There were mornings when she walked onto the film sets and felt the light—those large, insistent studio lamps—stroke her cheek as though she were already a creature of the silver screen. Actors drifted around her like constellations, Charles Farrell among them, charming and assured. Voices hummed behind curtains; the bright dust motes in the rafters trembled with possibility. It seemed that merely by breathing, she might join them in their ascent.

Then, as if the fates had tilted their hands, came the set of The Ship’s Bell and Joe Kennedy Jr., stepping into the room with the confident ease of a man accustomed to doors opening before he knocked. His smile—too bright, she would later think, like the flare of a match in a darkened room—lit some curious, hopeful part of her. It was dangerously easy to imagine offering her heart to such a man, so polished, so buoyed by the world’s expectations.

But the world itself was dimming. Shadows lengthened across Europe; newspapers crackled with the rumour of invasion; and the light in London, once theatrical and warm, took on the tremor of uncertainty. Barbara, unwilling to drift passively along the edges of this gathering storm—just as her steady, resolute brother Kent refused to—joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment. And thus the glamour, so recently her second skin, gave way to the white of bandages, the ache of sleepless nights, the unsentimental weight of bravery.

When the Blitz came—when the sky glared orange and the city shook as though some furious god were pounding at its gates—Barbara found herself suspended between two futures. Should she stay, breathing in the acrid air of a besieged London, or sail toward America, that distant shore of safety, leaving behind her mother, the city, the life she had barely begun to understand? The choice tore through her like a rift in the very fabric of her being.

Both Sides of the Pond: My Family’s War, 1933–1946, Barbara Kent Lawrence’s luminous rendering of her family’s passage through those years, moves between these crossroads—hers and Kent’s—with a clarity that feels at times like standing beside them, hearing their breath quicken, watching history gather around their ankles like a rising tide. Part memoir, part historical tapestry, the book gathers photographs, letters, and timelines, stitching them into a narrative that murmurs with the sorrow and splendour of lived experience.

We begin where hope begins: the day of Barbara’s acceptance to RADA. But soon the air thickens—first with uneasy quiet, then with the brutal din of a continent spiralling into war. The Phoney War, deceptive in its stillness, gives way to the frantic collapse of Belgium, and then to Dunkirk, where Kent’s hours slip by in smoke and sand and chaos. Here, the prose lingers not on the spectacle but on the heart—the tremor of fear, the fragile thread of duty, the strange calm that sometimes accompanies terror. Kent’s private uncertainties, revealed in reflective passages, do not diminish him; rather, they render him profoundly, piercingly human.

Meanwhile, Barbara crosses the Atlantic, her ship carving a narrow path through waters teeming with unseen danger. In America she must begin again, surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes and unfamiliar expectations, her thoughts echoing with the voices she has left behind. Her inner world becomes a kind of sanctuary—quiet, tremulous, resilient.

Her affection for Joe Kennedy Jr., tender and precarious, drifts through these chapters like a half-remembered melody. She dreams of a life serene and shared; yet the truth—a truth delivered with a mother’s soft sorrow rather than the man’s own voice—arrives like a cool wind, extinguishing the flame of hope she had cupped so carefully in her hands. The tragedy lies not merely in the loss but in the gentle inevitability of it.

Lawrence’s descriptions settle upon the mind with the clarity of film expanding in a projector’s light: Barbara beneath the theatre lamps; Kent watching men shovel sand into bulging sacks; the ghost-town ruins of Belgium; the fevered, smoky fever-dream of Dunkirk. Even the voyage aboard the Warwick Castle is rendered with such precision that one can feel, faintly, the Atlantic heaving beneath the hull.

Yet always—beneath the bombings, the marches, the letters that cross oceans with their burdens of hope—there beats the pulse of the people themselves. Their quiet terrors, their fleeting joys, their grief, their stubborn courage. One finishes the book not as a distant observer but as a companion, having walked beside Barbara and Kent through the dim corridors of war and into the uncertain light beyond.

It is, in the end, a story of many things—ambition and artistry, duty and loss, the ache of a future imagined and the beauty of a family bound, even in separation, by love. And when the final page folds shut, the echo of their steps lingers, soft but insistent, as though they have not quite left the room.

4.5 stars from The Historical Fiction Company

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