Irwin Shaw is a moral writer who conceives moral problems simply, feels them deeply, and dramatizes them with an often terrifying historical relevance. As a result, once met, his stories stay in the mind….
[The stories collected in "Act of Faith and Other Stories"] were written during the war about the war, but they cannot be taken retrospectively as an account of what has been. One finds, re-reading them in a period of unreal, unstable peace, that they gain in meaning, in the power to disturb, with the passage of time. For though Shaw was himself a soldier who was in these places at the time and brilliantly re-imagines for us the actualities of New York, Paris, Dakar, Cairo, Jerusalem and the French-African desert between 1942 and 1946, what he is really writing about is the never-ending, wolfish war of man on man; and his moralist's concern is never simply with what we do, but with the ironic, heart-breaking contrast between what we do and what we should have done….
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