Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, published in 1978, is a beautifully written work that tells the story of America at war through the experiences of a family in the midst of it.

It’s fiction but wrapped in a strong foundation of history and research. As Wouk says “I trust that knowing readers will find that it has been presented responsibly and with care.”

The book covers the reaction to Pearl Harbour, debates about isolationism and exceptionalism, the slow and messy mobilisation of America for war and the unfolding military and production successes that followed – some a product of chance and luck, others from simple human courage and, in the end, emerging technological and production prowess.

It has plenty of the chaos and failures in war, including strategic errors on the Eastern Front and around Singapore, poorly designed torpedoes – and wandering aircraft in search of targets, on both sides of key battles.

It switches between the Pacific, Middle Eastern and European experiences of the war and a domestic America full of the concerns and interests of a country not quite convinced it is at war until well into it.

Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt’s meetings and manoeuvrings are here too, told from the vantage of a US Navy captain who is pulled between Hawaii, Washington, Moscow, Los Alamos and key summits like the one in Tehran in 1942.

But it’s the human element that Wouk conveys best. Even in his telling of the Battle of Midway, the experiences of young pilots and older ship captains is woven in and out. The strains and impossible choices facing a small group of people trapped in German-dominated Italy and later Vichy France are told with empathy and realism.

And Wouk is wise about the common political and individual human tendency to discount the awful and horrific when it isn’t graphically and immediately present – with the story of the halting and almost wilfully blind response to the Holocaust until far too late that’s prominent through the book.

Wouk wrote for a purpose that matters now as much as when he put the pen down. His foreword tells us what that was.

“I have faith that the human spirit will prove equal to the long, heavy task of ending war.

Against the pessimistic mood of our time, I think that the human spirit – for all its dark side – is in essence heroic. The adventures narrated in this romance aim to show that essence in action.

The beginning of the end of War lies in Remembrance.”