China Sketchbook

This book is a little gem from an era long past which has huge value both as a window into that era and for the quality of the verses and accompanying illustrations. They illustrate in a unique way China and Shanghai in the late 1940s, and the mindset of the Americans who were here to help with the transition from Japanese occupation back towards normalcy.

This collection of poems, published first in 1946, was written by A.L. Crouch, a lieutenant with the US Army stationed in Shanghai, and published by the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. It went into at least a second edition, indicating that the poetry resonated with many of the GIs stuck so far from home in a willow pattern world they hardly understood. Such portraits, both text and drawings, of ordinary people and things in old China have huge value in terms of transmitting a sense of the times.