Best Selling Books by Paul FUSSELL

An incisive, unsentimental account of the emotional and psychological atmosphere of World War II and the war''s effect on the literary world.

The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century''s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell''s landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. For this special edition, the author has prepared a new afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

Presents a series of anecdotes that tell the history and meaning of American uniforms, identifying their cultural significance in terms of how uniforms unite and divide people as well as how they vary throughout the world.

Author focuses on the death of American sensibility and taste and how Americans are timid in relying on their own tastes and instinct.

The Boys’ Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell’s unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author’s own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children—for children they were—who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war’s brutal essence. “A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth,” Fussell writes in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, The Boys’ Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell’s profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell''s The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also 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.Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.

"This is not a book to promote tranquility, and readers in quest of peace of mind should look elsewhere," writes Paul Fussell in the foreword to this original, sharp, tart, and thoroughly engaging work. The celebrated author focuses his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious third-rate novelists, sexual puritans, and the "Disneyfiers of life". He moves from the inflammatory title piece on the morality of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima to a hilarious disquisition on the "naturist movement", to essays on the meaning of the Indy 500 race, on George Orwell, and on the shift in men''s chivalric impulses toward their mothers. Fussell''s "frighteningly acute eye for the manners, mores, and cultural tastes of Americans" (The New York Times Book Review) is abundantly evident in this entertaining dissection of the enemies of truth, beauty, and justice

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

Helps aspiring readers enlarge their sensitivity to the rhythmical and formal dimensions of poetry.

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

Part biography, part critical appraisal, this book traces the influences that have shaped Amis'' work and lends insight into a man readily characterized, particularly in later years, as a "literary rottweiler." Drawing attention first to Amis'' life, then to his work--his book reviews, gastronomic criticism, poetry, and essays are treated here, as well as his novels--Fussell''s even-handed yet engaging prose reveals the moral sensibilities that have informed, perhaps at times misinformed, Amis'' writing. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Please note that this is not ''The Official Boy Scout Handbook''. It is a collection of my essays and reviews and bagatelles on appearances, institutions, and society, writers, travel, and war written over the past fifteen years or so, and written on very different occasions and for different purposes."--Preface.

Sociaal-economische beschrijving van de verschillende lagen van de Amerikaanse bevolking

Elegido uno de los 100 mejores ensayos del siglo XX por la Modern Library. Ganador del National Book Award del círculo de críticos en el año de su publicación. Un emocionante análisis de la literatura escrita por los militares que participaron en la Primera Guerra Mundial: el primer ensayo que narró esa guerra desde el punto de vista de los combatientes. La Primera Guerra Mundial marcó el nacimiento de una nueva conciencia en Europa, patente en la literatura y en la vida y definida por la desconfianza, la ironía y el pesimismo existencial. La Gran Guerra y la memoria moderna rastrea los orígenes de aquel cambio histórico a través de la obra de los escritores ingleses que lo vivieron en primera persona.

本书把美国社会中的社会等级现象和三六九等人的生活品位作了细致入微的对比,内容包括敏感话题、解剖等级、以貌取人、住房、精神生活等。

Le sujet de ce livre est la vie psychologique et affective des Américains et des Britanniques pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ; les rationalisations et euphémismes dont ils eurent besoin pour affronter l''insoutenable réalité des années 1939-1945 ; la frustration du désir, enfin, exceptionnellement intense en ce temps de guerre, et quelques-uns des moyens dont ils usèrent pour l''assouvir. Les dégâts de la guerre sur les corps et les villes, sur les avions, les chars et les croiseurs sont clairs. Moins évidents sont ceux qu''elle a causés à l''intelligence, au discernement, à l''honnêteté, à l''individualité, à la complexité, à l''ambiguïté et à l''ironie, pour ne rien dire de l''intimité et de l''humour. Depuis cinquante ans, la guerre côté Alliés a été aseptisée et poétisée, à en devenir presque méconnaissable, par les sentimentaux, les patriotes à tout crin, les ignorants et les amateurs de chair fraîche. J''ai tenté d''équilibrer la balance.