These are some of the books I read during last half a century or so, and some of the thoughts, questions, reactions and insights, emotions - and so forth -, evoked on reading them, either then or later sometime during the interim years and decades, or even thinking over now, that are summed up here while trying to record my impressions about what I read.
Friday, August 20, 2010
All Quiet On The Western Front: by Erich Maria Remarque.
Most accounts of war are bugle led parades, with heros marching to supposed victory, This is the first time a book, a film dared to be different, telling the story of little boys marching to war with all its ignominies and death being merely one of the many horrible facts they endured that no one ought to have to go through. Revolutionary for its time and all the more so because it was about the first world war, assumed to be the lesser horror of the two whether wrongly or not.