If war can ever be said to be just, then this war is so; it is action for a moral cause, with the most rigorous of intellectual underpinnings. And yet everywhere I turn, I see injustice done in the waging of it. And every day, as I turn to what should be the happy obligation of opening my mind to my wife, I grope in vain for words with which to convey to her even a part of what I have witnessed, what I have felt. Geraldine Brooks has taken one of the classics of American literature, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women , and re-written the story from an entirely different perspective. This time, the main character is Mr. March, the father of the four "little women" who is absent for most of Alcott's novel as he is off fighting in the American Civil War. I have never read Little Women , but I have watched the film with Winona Ryder , Claire Danes etc. dozens of times. I remember wondering about the missing father who always seems distant although the girls read his ...