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Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |  | Author: Paul Fussell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
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Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 74127
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0195065778
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5488673
EAN: 9780195065770
ASIN: 0195065778
Publication Date: October 25, 1990
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Paul Fussell, a distinguished literary historian, served as an infantry officer during World War II, and the experience has haunted him ever since. It has also informed his books, among them The Great War in Modern Memory and Wartime, a book that is part memoir, part cultural-critical study, and that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of conflict. Fussell conjures the small details of battlefield experience -- the way a bird's song falls silent just before an artillery barrage, the curious plunking sound a spinning bullet makes, the drift of smoke over an obliterated village; he also evokes the Zeitgeist of the war years, an era when hometown grocery stores bore signs like this one: "Did you drown a sailor today because YOU bought a lamb chop without giving up the required coupons?"
Product Description
Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory remains one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. In its panoramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world. Now, in Wartime, Paul Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict in which he himself fought, to weave a more intensely personal and wide-ranging narrative. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on soldiers and civilians. He compellingly depicts the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II by analyzing the wishful thinking and the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality; by describing the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most importantly, by emphasizing the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and wit. Of course, no book of Fussell's would be complete without serious attention to the literature of the time. He offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. In this stunning volume, Fussell conveys the essence of that war as no other writer before him has.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 29
 These are scholarly essays but not particulary interesting to read May 19, 2010
R. Taylor (Arlington, VA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this book erroneously thinking that it would be an interesting read to complement Sledge's With The Old Breed and China Marine, but I was disappointed with his academic/scholarly style of writing. It seemed as if Fussell was writing for an audience of literary peers, rather than for a general audience wanting to gain insight into the plight of a WW2 solider. I didn't gain much from the "essays", except his disdain for the violence, the absurd romanticism, and the "unshared" sacrafices that surround WW2. I enjoyed listening to his dialogue during Burn's The War, but I would borrow a copy of this book before buying it. But definitely buy With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge....it's a fitting book to read on Memorial Day weekend to remind us all of the sacrafices made by our troops in war. Fussell also gives Sledge many accolades for his straightforward yet gripping memoir.
 Fussell seeks to "balance the scales." May 15, 2009
William S. Grass
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I first learned of Paul Fussell when I read his book entitled "Class: A Guide through the American Status System." It was there that I first encountered his sardonic wit and his superb eye for the ironic and absurd. He brings the same to Wartime, but in a more personal way, since it is his own service as an infantry officer in Europe in WWII that informs his perceptions. Throughout the book Fussell seeks to undermine what he calls the "high-mindedness" of WWII, or the "rationalizations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to 1945."
WWII for more than six decades has been monolithic in the popular American mind, and considered by most to be the "Good War." Almost everyone has a male relative that "fought" in WWII. The truth is, however, that among the sixteen million men in uniform, fewer than one in ten ever saw direct combat. The other ninety percent had a perception of combat not unlike the average woman, child or old man back in the States. This is dealt with by Fussell in the last chapter, entitled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books," which forms an appropriate climax to Wartime.
It is in this final chapter that Fussell lets the reader in on an uncomfortable little secret about the Good War: for the men at the "sharp end" who were doing the killing and the dying, it was not a struggle for the triumph of democracy over fascism or to stop this or that evil regime or for any other high abstracted ideal. Instead, it was just a grim struggle for survival, without any greater transcendent meaning, and neither the rear-echelon soldier within earshot of the fighting nor the folks back home had any clue what was actually going on. Read Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed to learn more about this theme.
I highly recommend Wartime to anyone interested in delving below the surface of the traditional historiography of WWII. And even if you don't appreciate Fussell's main themes, you will still find bibliographical references to a wealth of different combatants' firsthand accounts.
Finally -- The Truth About World War II April 21, 2008
anarchteacher (United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Paul Fussell's brilliant, earthy account of the lives of everyday soldiers in WWII is vastly superior to the shallow pap of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, or the pretentious PBS documentary series, The War.
My highest recommendation!
understanding World War II September 7, 2007
Yalensian
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Cynical, skeptical, and above all ironic, WARTIME explores -- from a social, cultural, literary, and psychological point of view -- what one might call the underbelly of World War II, that wide world beneath the myths of the "good war," the "greatest generation," and "band of brothers." Fussell, who gave World War I similar treatment in THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY, strives not so much to malign as to understand, to put events in perspective, to seek the truth through all the propaganda and distortion and cant and outright lies, to find the reality of the war.
One need not agree with all of Fussell's arguments nor share his cynicism to enjoy the book. Indeed, it's difficult to agree with such an overwrought description as "Japanese soldiers were being massacred on New Guinea and Guadalcanal." Understanding and truth-seeking require making distinctions, and there's nothing shameful in finding American troops -- despite the atrocities which they committed and which do deserve more attention -- more humane on the whole than their Japanese counterparts.
Still, WARTIME is a useful corrective to popular (and bromidic) accounts of the war that often imply that everyone marched off to war willingly and gleefully, that everyone was united in support of the war and the way it was waged, that everyone high-mindedly fought for freedom. Yes, there were heroism, courage, and nobility, but there were also nastiness, brutishness, cruelty, and dishonesty. By exposing the latter, Fussell says, we elevate the former. He concludes the book with the statement Eisenhower prepared in case the D-Day invasion failed. In it, the general takes full responsibility for the failure, a gesture Fussell calls "a bright signal in a dark time" -- a gesture that means nothing if we believe all the many millions of men in uniform would have done the same thing.
 The luxury of a safe view November 7, 2006
Darian N. Diachok (Alexandria, Virginia)
10 out of 17 found this review helpful
While Paul Fussell does an outstanding job of recreating the wartime tricks and habits that kept the war effort humming in the USA and England, he writes as if the entire war was an unnecessary, even childish distraction from more serious business. And perhaps to some extent the war was optional for America. But national survival hung in the balance for dozens of other countries, who didn't ask for the war, but once in, had to find ways to survive - an aspect of war some might find of interest. True, the war demanded that money be raised, industry retooled, soldiers schooled, workers motivated - and all quickly and without the elegance or finesse that Fussell would have preferred. So he meticulously documents the entire war effort, and especially on the home front, as puerile, incompetent, self-contradictory, fatuous, superficial. So if you want a good "anti-war" read to convince yourself that wars are stupid, this book is for you. But don't look for sympathetic insights into how countries have to cope once caught in the crossfire.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 29
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