This was a very difficult book to read for me because of the heart-wrenching human-suffering sections in it, but it is also the book I am very glad to have read. Not that I didn’t know enough about World War II, but I always looked at it from where I was, from the American point of view and to a degree from a limited European point of view.

The fact is, World War II was world-wide, both with its fighting and its horrors, and it started during the 1930s in Asia. What makes this book a winner is that it shows a war that involved many nations, and in doing that, it gives varied and widespread examples and stories of incidents.

The first chapter is especially poignant because it points to the worldwide disbelief that a couple of decades after World War I, such a disaster could and was about to happen.

The second thing that impressed me the most was the people’s willingness and extraordinary efforts of keeping a record of events, even in death camps, against all terror and suppression. They wrote on everything they could get their hands on, including scraps of paper, plaster, walls, stones, anything, and they something buried notebooks deep in the earth. After the war, at least some of this data was unearthed, cleaned, and made public. Also, some of what is written are beyond heartbreak and tears.

Then, the book delves deeply into the facts of the war and gives its details in an original and an impeccable style. The references to the strategies and the events do not follow a chronological sequence, however. In the beginning chapters, it is quite commonplace for the end of the war to be mentioned. Rather, the book follows a sequence of certain concepts. For example, one chapter deals with animals, which were mostly eaten, another farms and fields, yet another occupation and people under the occupying forces, especially the writers, a mass prisoner grave under Russian occupation in Kolyma, sending and receiving messages. Yet, other chapters take each nation and bring to light its involvement and suffering during this horrific time.

Then, an interesting movement took place during the war where writing was concerned. Rhetoric was sneered at, and just about everything was told in their simplest forms, and the mention of objects took a significant role rather than the human qualities and individualities or references to anything alive. This and similar literary movements of the war era are explained under the last tenth section, The Great Revolt, in four chapters, and through the works of many nations.

While this book may be the fare of history and literature buffs, I feel, because of its fascinating and sophisticated content, it should be circulated as required reading for us all, young and old alike.

learning the details of World War II as to the effects of it on humans, nations, and literature.

everything.

John R. Carpenter is a writer, editor, and a leading translator of books and poetry. He has been granted the National Endowment for the Arts three times and has won a series of awards for his translations.

It is an amazing work written with exceptional clarity. I can't even begin to imagine the research that must have gone into it.

The following is from the last paragraph in the book:
"It is a temptation to deny a past as lethal as the Second World War, or to set it apart from us at a distance, even a very great distance. It is tempting, also, to reduce it to national myths or fictions, to imagine that now we are more privileged. But when we look at the forms the writers gave their experiences, we can see it is our human nature they are describing, these are also our forms. No matter how much we wish to distance ourselves, or to create legends about the war, we fin our human likeness in these works; it is ourselves we see--with a shock of recognition--as in a cracked mirror."

This may reflect exactly why reading this book was so emotionally taxing for me.

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Created Jan 21, 2019 at 11:19pm • Submit your own review...