We've all watched "The Caine Mutiny" starring Humphrey Bogart (sorry, no full movie on YouTube!); some who don't suffer from megalo-bibliophobia even read the 500-plus-page book - okay, I made up the word "megalobibliophobia" but the fear of reading large books is very real!
The author, Herman Wouk, produced "The Caine Mutiny" at age 36, and it became the biggest bestseller in America since "Gone With the Wind" and made him one of the most popular writers of the 20th century. Early in his career he had confidently proclaimed: "I am going to write novels for the rest of my life, each one better than the last."
True to his words, he immersed himself in the history of Word War II and the Holocaust, and produced not one but two novels, totalling nearly 2,000 pages, "The Winds of War", published in 1971, and followed it up in 1978 with a sequel, "War and Remembrance", 1,400 pages long.
Each epic was adapted by Wouk into an award-winning TV miniseries, with "The Winds of War" becoming one of the most-watched television programs in history. Courtesy of YouTube - and my efforts to collect each instalment into one blog 😀 - you can watch both here and here.
What a lockdown treat! Take off your mask, grab a glass of wine, and enjoy! To paraphrase C.S Lewis, "You can never get a glass of wine large enough or a miniseries long enough to suit me."
