Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I - Softcover

O'shea, Stephen

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9780380731671: Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380731673 ISBN 13: 9780380731671

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1998

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World War I has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it

has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the

Western Front, a narrow swath of land in which millions of lives were lost. Believing

that "history is too important to be left to the professionals," journalist Stephen

O'Shea set out to walk the 450 miles through no-man's-land to discover for his generation

the meaning of the war. As his walk progresses, O'Shea recreates the shocking battles of the Western Front, and offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the

state of the land, and the cultivation of memory. An evocative fusion of past and present, BACKT TO THE FRONT will resonate, for all who read it, as few other books on war ever have.

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About the Author:

Toronto-born author and journalist Stephen O'Shea moved to France in the early 1980s. There, he took up journalism, shortly after completing postgraduate degrees in politics at the Universit� de Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and the prestigious Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris.

In 1989, Elle magazine relocated O'Shea to New York to be a senior features editor of their American edition. In 1993, he returned to Paris, where he worked as Variety's film critic, and published articles on French culture and politics for American, British, French, and Canadian magazines, including The Observer, The Times of London, Harper's Bazaar, Interview, Allure, and Mother Jones.

To research The Perfect Heresy, O'Shea moved to Perpignan in southern France in 1997, where he spent two years immersing himself in Cathar lore. In addition to The Perfect Heresy, O'Shea is also the author of the widely acclaimed Back to the Front (Walker & Company, 1997), a hiker's meditation on the trenches of World War I.

Stephen O'Shea currently lives with his wife, Jill Pearlman, and two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A Canadian journalist who has walked the weary length of WW I's western front reports movingly on his experiences and more. A Paris-based correspondent for Elle, Interview, and other periodicals, O'Shea began hiking the centerpiece combat zone of the so-called Great War almost by chance during the mid-1980s. The serpentine path (to which he returned time and again) begins around Nieuport on the Belgian coast, winds through the French countryside, and ends abruptly at the frontier of neutral Switzerland. Between the two extremes, the blood-soaked track of the trenches, from which Allied and German troops rose to slaughter one another by the millions during the 52-month conflict, twists through scores of storied venues. Cases in point range from Flanders (Ypres, Passchendaele) through Artois (ArmentiŠres, Arras, Vimy Ridge), Picardy, Champagne (Chemin des Dames, Reims), and Alsace-Lorraine (St. Mihiel, Verdun, the Argonne Forest). In his commentary as a tour guide, the author is by turns informative and censorious. Interspersing his point-to-point travelogue of abandoned redoubts, burial grounds, disputed barricades, monuments, museums, and ossuaries with short takes on the campaigns that earned hinterland villages a place in military history, he offers unsparing critiques of commanders on both sides of the fray (notably, Falkenhayn, Foch, Haig, Joffre, Nivelle, Pershing, and P‚tain). O'Shea also recalls his two Irish grandfathers, who survived the senseless carnage (as soldiers of the British Crown), albeit at considerable cost in mental and physical pain. Antiwar by conviction at the start of his explorations, he's something very like a militant pacifist at the end of a decade-long journey. A tellingly detailed account of a trek through yesteryear's killing fields, which unites past with present in affectingly evocative ways and with no small measure of art. (maps) -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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