Download or read book Soldier Girls written by Helen Thorpe and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A raw, intimate look at the impact of combat and the healing power of friendship” (People): the lives of three women deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the effect of their military service on their personal lives and families—named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly. “In the tradition of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Richard Rhodes, and other masters of literary journalism, Soldier Girls is utterly absorbing, gorgeously written, and unforgettable” (The Boston Globe). Helen Thorpe follows the lives of three women over twelve years on their paths to the military, overseas to combat, and back home…and then overseas again for two of them. These women, who are quite different in every way, become friends, and we watch their interaction and also what happens when they are separated. We see their families, their lovers, their spouses, their children. We see them work extremely hard, deal with the attentions of men on base and in war zones, and struggle to stay connected to their families back home. We see some of them drink too much, have affairs, and react to the deaths of fellow soldiers. And we see what happens to one of them when the truck she is driving hits an explosive in the road, blowing it up. She survives, but her life may never be the same again. Deeply reported, beautifully written, and powerfully moving, Soldier Girls is “a breakthrough work...What Thorpe accomplishes in Soldier Girls is something far greater than describing the experience of women in the military. The book is a solid chunk of American history...Thorpe triumphs” (The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book The Imagined Civil War written by Alice Fahs and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life. Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

Download or read book Looking for the Good War written by Elizabeth D. Samet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Download or read book The Good War written by Studs Terkel and published by New Press/ORIM. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “The richest and most powerful single document of the American experience in World War II” (The Boston Globe). “The Good War” is a testament not only to the experience of war but to the extraordinary skill of Studs Terkel as an interviewer and oral historian. From a pipe fitter’s apprentice at Pearl Harbor to a crew member of the flight that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, his subjects are open and unrelenting in their analyses of themselves and their experiences, producing what People magazine has called “a splendid epic history” of WWII. With this volume Terkel expanded his scope to the global and the historical, and the result is a masterpiece of oral history. “Tremendously compelling, somehow dramatic and intimate at the same time, as if one has stumbled on private accounts in letters locked in attic trunks . . . In terms of plain human interest, Mr. Terkel may well have put together the most vivid collection of World War II sketches ever gathered between covers.” —The New York Times Book Review “I promise you will remember your war years, if you were alive then, with extraordinary vividness as you go through Studs Terkel’s book. Or, if you are too young to remember, this is the best place to get a sense of what people were feeling.” —Chicago Tribune “A powerful book, repeatedly moving and profoundly disturbing.” —People

Download or read book The Sentimental Court written by Jonas Bens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern law seems to be designed to keep emotions at bay. The Sentimental Court argues the exact opposite: that the law is not designed to cast out affective dynamics, but to create them. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork - both during the trial of former Lord's Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Netherlands and in rural northern Uganda at the scenes of violence - this book is an in-depth investigation of the affective life of legalized transitional justice interventions in Africa. Jonas Bens argues that the law purposefully creates, mobilizes, shapes, and transforms atmospheres and sentiments, and further discusses how we should think about the future of law and justice in our colonial present by focusing on the politics of atmosphere and sentiment in which they are entangled.

Download or read book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780 1835 written by Neil Ramsey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

Download or read book The War for the Common Soldier written by Peter S. Carmichael and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

Download or read book The Secret History of Soldiers written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than five hundred combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history shows how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humour the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.

Download or read book The Good Soldier written by Ford Maddox Ford and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saddest Story Ever Told “I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.” - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier Originally titled as The Saddest Story, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford tells the story of two couples seen by one of the four ‘halves’. The story is tragic criticizing the early 20th-century American and English hypocritical aristocracy. All four are incapable of loving one another and end up prisoners to their unbound lust and greed. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes

Download or read book War Stories written by Philip Dwyer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre’s surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts.

Download or read book Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America written by Thomas J. Brown and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.

Download or read book Military Men of Feeling written by Holly Furneaux and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period. It traces a persistent narrative swerve from tales of war violence to reparative accounts of soldiers as moral exemplars, homemakers, adopters of children on the battlefield and nurses. This material invites us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism. It challenges ideas about the separation of military and domestic life, and about the incommunicability of war experience. Focusing on representations of soldiers' experiences of touch and emotion, the book combines the work of well known writers—including Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge—with previously unstudied writing and craft produced by British soldiers in the Crimean War, 1854-56. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes to military masculinity. A range of media enabled unprecedented public engagement with the progress and infamous 'blunders' of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians reflected on appropriate behaviour across ranks, forms of heroism, the physical suffering of the troops, administrative management and the need for army reform. The book considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class and military hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, and how this figure was used in campaigns for reform. The gentle soldier could also do more bellicose social and political work, disarming anti-war critiques and helping people to feel better about war. This book looks at the difficult mixed politics of this figure. It considers questions, debated in the nineteenth century and which remain urgent today, about the relationship between feeling and action, and the ethics of an emotional response to war. It makes a case for the importance of emotional and tactile military history, bringing the Victorian military man of feeling into contemporary debates about liberal warriors and soldiers as social workers.

Download or read book The Good Soldier written by Ford Madox Ford and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1915 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family - Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times - and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the "Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great" - men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle - exerted on him. In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer's editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century's greatest literary editors. Ford's most famous work was his Parade's End tetralogy, which he completed in the 1920's and have now been adapted into a BBC television drama. Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

Download or read book The Good Soldier written by Ford Madox Ford and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2018-11-21T22:18:07Z with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of belle époque Europe, an American couple—the narrator John Dowell and his wife Florence–and a British couple–Leonora and the titular “good soldier” Edward Ashburnham—meet and become firm friends. Travelling and socialising together, it’s a full nine years before the cracks start to show, but when they do the whole edifice starts tumbling to reveal the secrecy and lies concealed within. The Good Soldier is a classic example of the unreliable narrator genre. With a charitable view, everything John Dowell retells is plausible, but it doesn’t take much critical thinking to reframe the story’s events as something entirely more sinister. The novel is now frequently ranked by critics as one of the great pieces of twentieth-century literature. Ford Madox Ford, already published many times over by this novel’s release, and along with collaborations with both Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, went on to create and edit the influential literature journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book Victory through Harmony written by Christina L. Baade and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To serve the British nation in World War II, the BBC charged itself with mobilizing popular music in support of Britain's war effort. Radio music, British broadcasters and administrators argued, could maintain civilian and military morale, increase industrial production, and even promote a sense of Anglo-American cooperation. Because of their widespread popularity, dance music and popular song were seen as ideal for these tasks; along with jazz, with its American associations and small but youthful audience, these genres suddenly gained new legitimacy at the traditionally more conservative BBC. In Victory through Harmony, author Christina Baade both tells the fascinating story of the BBC's musical participation in wartime events and explores how popular music and jazz broadcasting helped redefine notions of war, gender, race, class, and nationality in wartime Britain. Baade looks in particular at the BBC's pioneering Listener Research Department, which tracked the tastes of select demographic groups including servicemen stationed overseas and young female factory workers in order to further the goal of entertaining, cheering, and even calming the public during wartime. The book also tells how the wartime BBC programmed popular music to an unprecedented degree with the goal of building national unity and morale, promoting new roles for women, virile representations of masculinity, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common British culture. In the process, though, the BBC came into uneasy contact with threats of Americanization, sentimentality, and the creativity of non-white "others," which prompted it to regulate and even censor popular music and performers. Rather than provide the soundtrack for a unified "People's War," Baade argues, the BBC's broadcasting efforts exposed the divergent ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation. This illuminating book will interest all readers in popular music, jazz, and radio, as well as British cultural history and gender studies.

Download or read book The Na ve and Sentimental Lover written by John le Carré and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston. "I have visited bohemia and got away unscathed." Aldo Cassidy is an entrepreneurial genius. At thirty-nine, he dominates the baby pram market and rewards his success with a custom Bentley. But Aldo’s bourgeois life is upended by a chance encounter with Shamus—a charismatic writer whose first and only novel blazoned across the firmament twenty years earlier. The two develop a passionate friendship that draws Aldo—smitten also with his new friend’s luscious wife—into a life of reckless hedonism that threatens to consume them all. John le Carré’s The Naïve and Sentimental Lover offers a dark and ribald send-up of both middle-class bohemian pretensions that will astonish and delight his many fans. With a foreword by the author.

Download or read book War and American Literature written by Jennifer Haytock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.