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All Quiet on the Western Front (Pacemaker Classics) Review
User Submitted All Quiet on the Western Front (Pacemaker Classics) ReviewsNovember 22, 2008 a moving read I read this in hight school, and yes it was an assignment,(fortunately my literature always made us think about the books we read instead of gripe about them in ignorance) but I loved it. Basically, it pulls no punches, sugarcoats nothing. The author is telling it like he knows it from being there - war is hell, no matter what it's fought for, no matter whose side you're on. Reading a book from the point of a German fighter and seeing how they were all just lost kids too brings it home. This is not Tolkien (no offense to a great author, of course); when we make war, we're fighting against other humans, not some scary enemy who has no feelings and is pure evil. Overall the writing was captivating and the story is still relevant. It really opens your mind if you let it. All leaders should read it before considering such a grave undertaking as war. November 9, 2008 "A line, a short line, trudges off into the morning." I first read this book when I was quite young. Too young, I think, to understand it. What I took away with me then was the anti-war message and a lingering sense of the grim awfulness of the Front. Sort of, at least-- I'm pretty sure that I didn't know what a Front was besides some general sense of the Front Line. I certainly wasn't really old enough to feel the poignancy of my own mortality-- death at that age was restricted to grandfathers and other people. I honestly think that I felt more for the dying horses than for the dying men. Reading it now as I approach middle age, this feels like a good place to appreciate the book more. I say "appreciate", since I am not sure that anyone who hasn't been in a battle situation can claim understanding. The doomed and fatal youth of Paul, Haie and Albert mean something to me now. Boys that age shouldn't die on the battlefield. If you have a decent sense of teenagers and young adults and then try to imagine them in these situations which required such patience and bravery-- it makes the casual reader feel small. And the dying horses still upset me, but I guess that's hard-wired into my personality. All Quiet on the Western Front is possibly the most influential modern novel of war. Its repeated message of the patterns of boredom and casual violence find its echoes through later books and film. It finds its modern heirs in films like Jarhead. It isn't a terribly complex book; many plot points feel obvious. It tends to be worth celebrating more for the honesty (raw) of its story than for the craft and distance of the writer. Recommended, particularly to those with an interest in WWI or the military novel. October 11, 2008 A Great Work I am a soldier with the US Army who has been deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom twice and Operation Enduring Freedom once. And yes I have lost some close friends to these wars. I must say this is one of my favorite books on war that I have read next to the Red Badge of Courage. Yes soldiers are opened minded, I do know that this book focuses on the darker side of War and is considered an Anti-War Novel. I do not want to go into specific details of the book; it is something you should experience for yourself. I will say that it is interesting how this is the German Army in World War I and yet there are many similarities of things that I have gone through that are almost 100 years later in the American Army. These are the same trials and tribulations that a soldier is put through no matter what time period you are in, the interpersonal relationships where the people around you become your family and the tragedy that you experience. And the fear of being in combat and how after awhile you become numb from it. "This does not mean that you are war mongers. On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato that wisest of all philosophers, 'Only the dead have seen the end of war." General Douglas MacArthur September 17, 2008 Murder on the Western Front 'All Quiet on the Western Front' is Remarque's timeless tale of war during WWI. It is trite to refer to it as an 'anti-war' story. It is all of that and much more. It's a story of youth, patriotism, naivete and brutal death in the mud of German trenches. It's a tale of bloody assaults, destructive retreats and the story of brave men facing impenetrable walls of bullets and steel. It is told from the German pespective but the story could have been told, with equal impact, from the British, French or Russian perspective. Their experiences, despite differences in nationalities, was almost exactly the same--filth, fear, desperation, wounds and death. To what end? Remarque's answer is simple--none. It's all for nothing. All the heroism, cowardice, greed and sacrifice are, ultimately, for exactly nothing. Boys don't come home to their parents or women. They are built into the walls of trenches or their bloated corpses float in the watery mud of shell craters. In the end, they all--German and Allies--smell the same and the maggots are the only ones to benefit. Of all the poignant scenes, the one I like best is when the young German soldier, seeking shelter during an enemy counterattack, dives into an open crypt. A French soldier dives in after him with his bayonet. There is a struggle and the Frenchman is killed. Now the young German must live face to face with his guilt. He goes through his victim's wallet and finds pictures of his wife and children and loving letters from his wife, praying that he will return to her safe. The German grieves over the horror of his act. There is a day of quiet. The war seems far away. A butterfly lights on a flower growing in the muck. The young soldier's hand reaches out to touch it. The sniper takes careful aim... Not too remarkably, Hitler on coming to power, exiled Remarque. Hitler gloried in the winnowing process of war, regarding the culling the 'unfit' in favor of the most fit as Darwinian progress. Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico September 12, 2008 Not in English I received All Quiet In The Western Front but found that the CD was not recorded in English. September 4, 2008 A must for any student or non-specialist general reader "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a well-known work throughout the western world. "Bloom's Guides: All Quiet on the Western Front" is a complete and comprehensive book on the book. Exploring Remarque's work, looking at the roots and meanings scattered throughout that may not be obvious to a simple reader, it is also enhanced with a collection of critical essays discussing the work's impact on the world of literature and the world in general. This Bloom's Guide to a literary classic is a must for any student or non-specialist general reader wanting better understand the nuances, historical references, character insights, and writing style that created "All Quiet on the Western Front." August 11, 2008 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!!! July 19, 2008 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. July 6, 2008 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. June 30, 2008 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. For more All Quiet on the Western Front (Pacemaker Classics) reviews click here.
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