Books About War (Fiction/Non-Fiction)

[Mantenna]

We don't want our children becoming Anti-American, do we? Of course not! So, we teach them everything good and skim through the bad stuff so they don't go into a low morale state when it comes to their homeland.

Funny how there are so many high-schoolers taking that approach anymore, then.

[ixcrisxi]

Really? Never noticed, Manny! Est-ce que tu comprends ca (accent cedille on the c in ca), aussi?

[Mantenna]

I wasn't saying you had that attitude--I've just noticed a lot of generally anti-American sentiment coming from certain groups of high-schoolers around here. It's a free country, so they can think what they want...but it's just interesting.

[ixcrisxi]

I know, Mantenna. I didn't mean to come off as vindictive about it at all!

Interesting? Si...

[Dinahann]

"Johnny Got His Gun", was given to me the summer I turned 24, and it made a lasting impression on me. It's a fiction anti-war treatise written by Dalton Trumbo, who was later blacklisted for it during the McCarthy era. A very powerful and moving book, it was made into movie in the late forties, I believe, but I never saw it. I DID see the video "One" by Metallica which is based on the book and has clips from the movie.

[woopow]

I totally agree with you about the Band of Brothers miniseries. It was really powerful. I just bought the book, but I haven't started reading it yet.

I made the mistake of reading the book first...not nearly as impressed with the movie.
In the book, there is soooo much more detail about what those men went through just to become paratroopers (years of brutal training before falling into Normandy). I'm not much of a military history buff, but kudos to Stephen Ambrose, R.I.P., for being able to write a story that doesn't come off condescending nor too technical for this Armed Forces Illiterate.

[Leftcoaster]

I don't know that I'd consider it primarily a "war" book, but I just finished E.M. Nathanson's The Dirty Dozen, described on the books cover as his "savage novel of World War II", and would recommend it.

I thought initially when I picked it out of a bin that it would be a rip off of the movie, but it preceeded the movie and is a totally different experience than the movie. The action that the movie showed amounts to a relatively small portion of the book, the actual attack on the chateau is described in a couple of pages by way of an after action report based on the initial interview with the only survivor then in Allied hands.

The book goes very deep into the backgrounds and psychological motivation of the primary characters and compliments the movie nicely. Its easier to see how Reisman became the hard character needed to mold these misfits seeing that he'd walked on the wild side as well, from his days back in the states, leading to his adventures of a military nature south of the border, in China, as well as in the Spanish Civil War, prior to getting official when we entered WWII. The book shows that Reisman and Colonel Breed, the paratrooper with an attitude had a previous run-in that didn't help matters along when they met again.

More so than in the movie, the pace of the book allows for the incremental awareness of the men bonding to him (and him to them) to be demonstated.

Its a much better book than I'd expected when I picked it up.