The Great War and Modern Memory

Product Details

Product Reviews

(4 stars) - Great book. Kindle version needs proofreading.
This is truly one of the great war books (and great Great War books) of our time. It is written at a level for any thinking adult, although someone who is interested in military minutia will likely be disappointed, and, obviously, some bored undergraduates will be exasperated.

The Kindle version was apparently scanned, converted to text, but not adequately proofed, because it contains an excessive number of characteristic image-to-text conversion errors, such as rendering "m" as "in".

(1 stars) - Good Start, Poor Finish
The book starts really interesting talking about life in the trenches and other details about soldiers' lives during WWI. However, in my opinion, the book takes a turn for the worse from then on out. The rest of the book mainly just consists of reading poems and other quoted literature over and over. Though the works of art are relevant they get annoying having one after another.

(5 stars) - A Recommendation from a Pacifist
I am not what anybody would call a "war buff." Indeed, I abhor anything that has to do with it and am disturbed and appalled at how many monuments, institutions and landmarks glorify repetetive, sesneless killings.

So I'm the last person in the world you'd expect to re-read "The Great War and Modern Memory," right? Well, I guess you could say that I'm one of Paul Fussell's ironies: My pacifism is one of the reasons why I enjoy and value the book so much.

All right, I'll put my cards on the table. I was an English major in college. And I teach English now. So, the work of a scholar as thoroughgoing and engaging as Fussell would be of interest of me. Anyone who's as sensitive to, and intelligent about, literature and other cultural artifacts can keep me interested if he were writing about telephone directories.

I like to think of this book as a kind of sequel to "Goodbye to All That" and "The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man." Fussell may not be a poet, as Siegfried Sassoon was, or an all-around creative writer like Robert Graves was. He is, however, what used to be known as a "man of letters," in the sense that, say, Samuel Johnson, Diderot and Voltaire were. What are we going to do when he's gone? (He's 85 years old already!)

Before reading Fussell's book, I had not read most of the works he mentioned in it. After reading it, I made a point of reading everything he mentioned, including the works I had previously read. As a result, I saw them as I never had before: as progenitors of so much of what I read in my youth. "The Naked and the Dead" would not have been possible without "Goodbye to All That" or "A Farewell to Arms;" without the poetic experiments engendered by the war's aftermath, there's no "Waste Land," which means no "Howl."

The great thing about Fussell is that he makes all of his connections in a commonsensical sort of way and expresses it in plain language. So, just because he's a critic, don't be afraid to dive into "The Great War and Modern Memory." And, if you're a pacifist, you should definitely be reading the book, because, if nothing else, Fussell and the writers he includes will help to illustrate and amplify the sense that war is ultimately futile.

(5 stars) - The rich literature of the Great War
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of American military affairs. Paul Fussell's award winning book, The Great War and Modern Memory, elaborates on how the "idea" of the "Great War" was used not only by participants, but also by novelists too young to serve, in order to shape and influence "post-modern literature." Fussell's comprehensive examination of unpublished war memoirs, fictional works, poetry, letters, propaganda, and journalistic accounts, provided a fascinating narrative for how soldiers' experiences in the Great War were remembered and transmitted. For example, he did an admirable job of using the diaries and literature of America's "doughboys" to express their reactions to the "crucible" of war. An American soldier in the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Eugene Kennedy poignantly recorded in his diary the sense of helplessness soldiers often felt in war when he wrote how he was, "Stumbling through dark, dripping woods, guided only by his hand on the pack of the man ahead." Fussell also found that our modern lexicon was replete with phrases and words from the Great War. For example, "The phrase No Man's Land has haunted the imagination for sixty years, although its original associations with fixed positions and static warfare are eroding."

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.

(5 stars) - The rich literature of the Great War
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of American military affairs. Paul Fussell's award winning book, The Great War and Modern Memory, elaborates on how the "idea" of the "Great War" was used not only by participants, but also by novelists too young to serve, in order to shape and influence "post-modern literature." Fussell's comprehensive examination of unpublished war memoirs, fictional works, poetry, letters, propaganda, and journalistic accounts, provided a fascinating narrative for how soldiers' experiences in the Great War were remembered and transmitted. For example, he did an admirable job of using the diaries and literature of America's "doughboys" to express their reactions to the "crucible" of war. An American soldier in the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Eugene Kennedy poignantly recorded in his diary the sense of helplessness soldiers often felt in war when he wrote how he was, "Stumbling through dark, dripping woods, guided only by his hand on the pack of the man ahead." Fussell also found that our modern lexicon was replete with phrases and words from the Great War. For example, "The phrase No Man's Land has haunted the imagination for sixty years, although its original associations with fixed positions and static warfare are eroding."

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.

Popular Searches in Books