Should be required reading for our political representatives

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	• All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque Fawcett, 1982 average customer review:based on 452 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Life is short, and then you die

This old book of 296 pages, first published in 1928 in German, is often considered the "greatest war novel of all time," and it is almost unbearable to read. Who knows if it is "the best?" That's immaterial and moot. There is no glory here, no swashbuckling heroism, and no adulation of the honor of dying for no discernible reason. It is simply a plain, gorgeous story about the awfulness of war.

A young German, Paul, age 20, serving in the army, is the narrator, his story told in first person. He and his buddies, as the war claims them one by one, endure 3 years of World War I trench warfare on the French-German lines. They knit themselves into a fierce family of unlikely comrades. They love one another desperately and despair that when the war is over, they will not know what to do with themselves. They only know death, killing and horror.

Blood, death, despair, inhuman conditions, and frailty abound. Lice and rancid food characterize their daily life. Fear, grief and compassion fill their hearts. Paul nearly loses his mind when he has to kill a Frenchman, a guy with a wife and child at home, and then has to endure a couple of nights with him in his shell-hole. He apologies to the body and begs it for forgiveness.

Page 115, "The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers."

Paul's first home leave is beyond painful. It humiliates and degrades. The reader cringes and shies away from the pages of Paul's visit to his home village and family. The psychological toll of war on everyone overwhelms. Paul's hospital stay after being wounded, is a ghastly indictment of all who wage war and even of those who try to help the injured.

While welcome and very funny, the occasional army style bad-boy antics and the ever-present gallows humor are the things that keep the men sane - or does it? They distract themselves to distraction.

The prose is Hemingway-like in its terse, simple-sentence style. Sometimes the translation suffers from its own tell-tale German "accent." In all, the writing is irredeemably blunt and yet does not offend.

Remarque speaks to us through Paul, and he speaks for all of us. Like the movie "Gallipoli," which is the best anti-war movie I've ever seen, this book is the one of the best anti-war statements in print.

"All Quite on the Western Front" is terribly difficult to read. It is grisly and graphic. But read it we must.

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What is it good for?

The first classic I have read in a while. As great as advertised ("The GREATEST WAR NOVEL of ALL TIME") on the cover.

Devastating in its matter-of-fact dealing with the suffering of dog soldiers in the Great War, but perhaps most powerful in its occasional humor.

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Should be required reading for our political representatives

I grew up playing war like every other kid and had a somewhat glamorized view of war. When we went to war in Iraq for the first time I thought it was kind of cool. Being a Jewish person who lost a great deal of their family in the Holocaust having any sympathy for any Germans was not an easy thing to believe I could ever feel. This book floored me,the absolute horror of war just rippled through me for the first time in my life. What a callous maniac you have to be to start a war, declaring one is the ultimate sacrifice you can ask of people and should be under extreme circumstances only. This book is a must read, well written and engrossing. Enjoy reading it, if that's the appropriate term.

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Unusually packaged, but I got it!

The book came wrapped in cardboard and tape, but nothing was damaged. Great buy! Awesome book, very intense and graphic. I had to read it for an AP European History class.

Great BOOK!!!

Thank you for your timely shipping. This book was for a reading assignment, and it was a great book. I did not really want to read it, but it was an exciting and very informative book. I enjoyed it so much I got an A+ on my report!!!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Remarque's 1929 novel is among the finest antiwar literature written after the First World War.

The title, Erich Maria Remarque?s All Quiet on Western Front, part of Chelsea House Publishers? Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Erich Maria Remarque?s All Quiet on Western Front through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Erich Maria Remarque, a chronology of the author?s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

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