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Title: Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0-19-506577-8 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.74 (23 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: It's not Shirer, but that's not the point.
Comment: Readers of this book tend to either love it or hate it. I think this is an enourmously valuable book when taken for what's intended to convey. This book describes the cultural gestalt of the American people during the second world war and the experience of the common soldier. When held to the standard of historical research of the sort William L. Shirer produced in his history of the Third Reich, it natuarally falls short. (Althought I strongly disagree with the critique of Fussells scholarship offered in other reviews.) The book is not a strict history, but a social commentary and a view from a a man who fought in the war.
Dr. Fussell served during WWII and is personally closer to the material than his award winning work in "The Great War and Modern Memory." What is lost in his capacity for objectivity is more than compensated for in his empathy, his insight and his common touch with the experience of the young men who fought in the war. Who could blame a man who fought in a war for being critical of aspects of it? Why should we expect him to extole its virtues?
Is it really such heresy to state that people had doubts about fighting the second world war? Does it really show disrespect to acknowledge that the generation who fought the second world war thought about what the war meant? If anything, bringing this to light shows that people back then weren't too different from ourselves. It shows that as a society we have known the same anxieties and resevations about war that we do today and survived.
We are rapidly loosing the generation of men who fought WWII, and with them an important group of people who participated in the shaping of the modern world. This book communicates one mans educated and eloquently stated perspective on the defining conflict of the last hundred years. We could use more books like this, and I'm grateful that we have this one.
Rating: 5
Summary: "I could carve a better man out of a banana!"
Comment: I want to disagree with the three previous reviews, to defend Fussell's vision. One reviewer seems to be confusing "Wartime" with Fussell's memoir "Doing Battle." The former is not intended as a memoir but as an alternate history--an alternative to the kind of history represented by a book recommended by another of the reviewers, i.e.,, Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers." If Ambrose's book can be seen as a companion to Spielberg's romantic (and therefore disappointing) "Saving Private Ryan," then "Wartime" is parallel to--in fact is clearly inspired by--Heller's satirical "Catch-22." What Fussell and Heller have in common is that they both reject absolutely the work of the apologists of war--a category into which all three of these reviewers probably fit. What the reviewer who labels Fussell's book "unadulterated junk" seems to object to most is that Fussell, by training a literary critic, should have the presumption to write HISTORY. The reviewer suggests that, instead of reading Fussell, one should read anti-war novels, including Heller's "Catch-22." Here's what Heller had to say about Fussell's book: "No novel I have read surpasses its depiction of the awful human costs to all sides of modern warfare. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is unforgettable." What these reviewers find unFORGIVEable is that Mr. Fussell has, in writing this book, stepped outside the established conventions of historiography--that is why a book that to Heller and to me (another of those blasted literary types--YUCK!) is eminently readable appears to them "confused." They haven't yet learned how to read the sort of history Fussell is writing. THEY are confused, not Fussell. I suspect these reviewers would prefer the sort of history written by Kurt Vonnegut's Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. And Rumfoord's attitude toward Billy Pilgrim, whose very existence problematizes Rumfoord's "official" history of the bombing of Dresden, rather nicely parallels that of these three reviewers toward Fussell: "It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord's ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning" ("Slaughterhouse Five", pp. 191-92). The language Fussell is speaking is well worth learning. These reviewers should take a lesson.
Rating: 3
Summary: Fussell returns to the Second World War
Comment: I read this book for a university History class. My professor's take on the book? Not a good history, and not even an effective piece of literature. Gee, then what is it? What my professor did admire about it is that it attempted to strip away the myths romanticizing the war experience.
My own personal take on the book? Having read The Great War and Modern Memory, I had some serious doubts about whether Fussell would be capable of writing a book like Wartime adequately. He is an English professor, not a historian. The Great War and Modern Memory, indeed, was a sophisticated study on WWI literature, but as a history it was flawed. Wartime, on the other hand, is categorized only as a history. Reading the book, I indeed noted one nearly fatal flaw. Many of Fussell's observations are not referenced, and many that are are referenced to fictional works. Still, Fussell being a veteran of the war, I suppose he would have been able to pick out what in the fictional works stood out to him as real. Wartime, then, reads better as a memoir, but even that is tricky since Fussell rarely refers to himself. I have no idea what battles Fussell even fought in, though I believe he was in Europe.
The book sheds some light on what conflict was like in WWII. At least one other reviewer has said that people already had a general idea of the realities, but the fact today is that a new generation lives in an age of cruiser missiles and embedded journalism, and it's hard to think of "precision bombing" in WWII without thinking of the 1990-1 Persian Gulf and 2003-4 Iraq Wars. I respected Wartime for its blunt honesty, and for the times when it seemed like a sequel to The Great War and Modern Memory for tying general war experiences with the depelopment of war literature. Some have complained the chapter on readings in the war was tedious. In fact, I sympathized with his take on the publication Horizon, since my enjoyment of the arts is mostly limited to a similar compilation of works. I also found his despription of comic book clubs sympathetic. This is a time, after all, when fan base for Lord of the Rings is soaring.
I know that I now view the fighting in WWII in a less romantic light, more like Vietnam. The book is similar to Saving Private Ryan in that way. Other reviewers of Wartime have bashed that movie as romanticism paying lip service to war-is-horrible, but I viewed it more as a way of saying "These soldiers have sacrificed all of this for you. What are you doing to earn this?" I still think WWII was a just war (just think about an Axis victory), but it was by no means an adventure.
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Title: The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (Modern Library Chronicles, 14) by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0679640886 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0195133323 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Doing Battle : The Making of a Skeptic by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0316290610 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 07 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.99 |
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Title: The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II by Peter Schrijvers ISBN: 0814798071 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Before Their Time: A Memoir by Robert Kotlowitz ISBN: 0385496036 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 15 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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