The Great War and Modern Memory, (Hardcover)

from ManipledMutineer

A challenging read, not to be taken as a straight history of the First World War but as an informative and engaging tour of the way literature and drama both informed and were informed by the war, in pursuit of the author's thesis that the predominantly ironic mode of understanding life in the tw...

from vguy

He wanders a bit and sometimes has a clever ( perhaps he would call it ironic) tone that seems frivolous in light of what he deals with, but ultimately the book delivers. A view of how these second rank authors (Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, et al)! Have a power and importance because of what they li...

from AlexTheHunn

Fussell takes us through various aspects of World War I, especially focusing on how the reality of the war differed from the offical version of it. He compares soldiers' experiences through their interviews, diaries, letters, etc. with the general, sanitized packaged version.

from setnahkt

From the WWI reading program. Author Paul Fussell points out the number of terms that became permanent parts of the language due to WWI - "in the trenches", "going over the top", "no-man's land". (I was thinking more of terms that no longer have a military meaning, or at least not a primarily mil...

from TheAmpersand

While it's true that Fussell prefers later memoirs to more immediate accounts of the war and doesn't conclusively prove that the First World War was history's first or most ironic war, "The Great War and Modern Memory" remains a wonderfully engaging and useful example of intellectual history. Fus...