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As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story | 
 enlarge | Author: Emma Sweeney
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $1.90
You Save: $8.05 (81%)
New (29) Used (24) Collectible (2) from $0.23
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 1210948
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0316738719
Dewey Decimal Number: 359.0092273
EAN: 9780316738712
ASIN: 0316738719
Publication Date: April 4, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New, unread, unsed and in perfect conditions with no missing or damaged pages, may have a remainder mark.Varying degrees of shelf wear. Great Customer Service! No hassle retrns!
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Product Description
At the end of WWII, a young navy pilot named Jack Sweeney fell crazy in love with a California girl named Beebe - just before he was shipped off to the Pacific with his squadron. From stations around the Pacific, he wooed her with letters full of teasing charm, hokey humour and sincere affection. When Jack returned to the States and asked her to marry him, Beebe said yes. Emma Sweeney never knew her father. He was killed in a plane crash just months before she was born and her mother remarried soon after. It was only years later, after her mother's death, that Emma found a package of letters tied in a pink ribbon. In those touching, warm and funny letters she met her father for the first time.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Fall in Love with Jack and Beebe August 23, 2008
Lesia Valentine (Down South in the Land of Cotton)
When I first heard of As Always, Jack, I came here to learn more about it. Upon discovering it to be a slender volume of love letters, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it, and I couldn't wait. I opened the book to the first page sample page, and before I finished the third, I was already choked up and had tears in my eyes.
It was Emma Sweeney's sense of loss and longing that evoked my sympathy. Bereavement is difficult enough for adults to live with, but Emma was only ten years old when she was finally able to grieve for the father she would never know. I could empathize with her need to find any little scrap of information about him, to have any little thing to cling to, and how that desire became a driving force in her life. I commiserated with her proneness to idealize him, and her eventual adult awareness that he was the one person who would never, could never, hurt or disappoint her. He would always be perfect. His image would never tarnish. I suspect that sharing her father with the world helped to bring a measure of completeness to her life. I knew it would be a wonderful book because it was easy to see it was a labor of love.
While reading Emma's poignant introduction to the love letters her father wrote to her mother, Beebe, while they were separated during WWII, I expected the book to be bittersweet and full of longing. Instead, his letters are filled with the joyous certainty of a young man head over heels in love with a beautiful blonde he met at a dance just days before he shipped out. I probably noticed different things about Jack than others did because I saw him through an astrologer's eyes: he was an Aquarian whose life was archetypical of the sign. He made a career of aviation, liked to read his horoscope, had a quirky sense of humor, and an uncanny ability to see into the future. Even in death he was enigmatic, having disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. His last letter to Beebe stunned and left me tearful, full of wondering. Fortunately for us, and thanks to their daughter's love, Jack and Beebe Sweeney will live on forever.
 A story with real meaning January 10, 2007
Carolyn Pratt (vilonia AR)
I purchased this book for a friend of mine whose husband was also named Jack Sweeney. She is also his widow and the mother of his five sons. With so many similarities I couldn't resist getting this for her. After the book arrived I had time to glance through it myself and found myself reading it from cover to cover! It puts you back in time.
CL Pratt
a simple story that packs a complex wallop July 13, 2006
Jesse Kornbluth (New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sometimes I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I'd like to meet. With only one plot, so I don't have to remember who's who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive.
Not an easy book to find.
So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short --- 179-page --- book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew.
The 45 letters tell of Jack's courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii.
What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child --- Emma.
It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died --- and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation.
These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I've never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn't I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that's happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe's letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of these letters --- you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy.
Within five months, he's closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe --- people who believe that when two people are married, they're the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn't laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did.
The letters pile up, then stop abruptly --- for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack's return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956 when he died.
Emma reads through the letters, and does some digging, and finds out one fact that her mother had never revealed to her. It will make you cry --- sudden, hot, brief tears. And you'll cry again when you read Jack's "last letter", written just a few days before his death. Which is just as it should be. A love story with a sad ending, and then a new chapter with a little girl....that's classic material.
I read such stylish, sophisticated, brilliant books. I stretch to understand them, to be worthy of them. And here is this slim volume, so simple, so tender. The point couldn't be more obvious. And yet it too is a stretch. Maybe a bigger one. Maybe a much bigger one.
Did you ever see a dream walking? May 16, 2006
M. A. Bechaz (Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Did you ever wish you could meet the perfect man, the kind of man who has a sense of humour, who is intelligent, who talks about his feelings, and who writes you the kind of love letters that not only make you feel gooier than a marshmallow but also restore your faith in all mankind? Well, Jack IS that man! As I read his letters, I couldn't help but fall wholeheartedly in love with him. In fact, I don't think any woman could read this and not fall in love with Jack. He's even dreamier than a year's worth of the R.E.M. stage of sleep.
Jack should have been a writer, if only he'd lived long enough. He had the gift of the gab in spades. His letters, written off the cuff, are better than the writing you find in books that writers have spent years refining and rewriting.
But most of all, Jack is a true romantic. Seriously, I think this is about the best love story I have ever read. If you have a soft spot in your heart for true romance, if you like nothing more than a love story, then all I can say is READ THIS BOOK! And the best thing about it is, Jack's not fictitious. He really lived. Knowing that there really are men like this in the world, who aren't just invented by some writer of fiction, will really gladden your heart, just as it did mine.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is definitely in my list of top ten books of all time.
As Always, Jack : A Wartime Love Story March 13, 2006
lezly perez (New York, Bronx)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book i chose to read was "As always Jack" by Emma Sweeney". The book was reprinted not so long ago in April 2003. Written in the 1940's.
There are not many characters in the book, just Jack and Beebe and their daughter. This book is mostly written in letter form by Jack who is a 26 year old navy pilot. After about only two weeks of being together their relationship gets stronger and the eventually fall in love.
The theme of the book is a middle aged women ( daughter of Beebe and Jack) discovers her father past and relationship with her
dead mother. Its a very sad and sympathetic novel. Also it leaves you feeling curious. To me it was curious because you never find out what ever happen to Jack. After his plane being reported as missing and him being lost in the Bermuda triangle his wife assumes he is dead. But no one really knows how he died, for example if he drowned or died of hunger. There was a little bit of foreshadowing also. Such as when Jack wrote a letter saying that if he passed away during his journey to never forget who he was and that is all he wanted..To be remembered. To me this was foreshadowing because in reality he did pass away but at least Beebe new what he wanted after he had passed away.
My favorite character is Jack. He is miles away from Beebe but still keeps in touch with her by written to her continuously. He can be an inspiration or role model for middle age men, for his caring and loving even thought he won't be able to see his loved ones within months. It made me feel so sad reading those letters because he would inform to Beatrice that he has reached a different country and what he did their and who he met. But Beebe only wrote to him a few letters and to me that is not fair, because he took time to write those letters and she only replied to about 5 of them.
Their daughter never even got to meet her father or even get a chance to see what he looked like. There's was a small picture
she had but his face was so blurry in the picture she couldn't see her resemblance to him.
My favorite part of the book was when she finally found out that her father new she was going to be born and at least had a thought of her and how she would grow up to be. This brought a smile to my face because the daughter was always worried that her father didn't even know she existed or was going to exist. So now she didn't feel lost anymore she knew what her past was.
I strongly do recommend this novel because it puts you in an uncomfortable place you don't want to be in but it also lets you know how it was so many years ago and how it is not to grow up with a father and not even have a clue to who he was.
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