Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic - Softcover

Fussell, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316290610 ISBN 13: 9780316290616

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1998

Synopsis

In this highly-praised autobiographical work, the author of "The Great War and Modern Memory" recounts his own experience of combat in WWII and how it became a determining force in his life. "Doing Battle" is at once a summing-up of one man's life and profoundly thoughtful portrait of America's own search for identity in the second half of this century.

About this title

Review:

For most, World War II is nothing but a chapter in history--for most Americans, a rosy and happy one. But Paul Fussell, a novelist and WWII veteran, reminds us that only those who've experienced it can truly understand that war is hell. He writes with bite and humor of the horrors and inequalities of the so-called "Good War," which he says "for the United States, [was] an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all Americans." Not exactly the thoughts of a sentimentalist, but the notion that war is horrible should be eternally reinforced, and Fussell does so with a fury and skill few writers can muster.

About the Author:

Paul Fussell, critic, essayist, and cultural commentator, has recently won the H. L. Mencken Award of the Free Press Association. Among his books are "The Great War and Modem Memory, " which in 1976 won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award; "Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars; Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War;" and, most recently, "BAD or, The Dumbing of America." His essays have been collected in "The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations" and "Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays." He lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316290610
• ISBN 13: 9780316290616
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336