Paul Fussell (1924–2012)

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Most people who have read Paul Fussell have read The Great War and Modern Memory and/or :Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Both are superb analyses
of modern mass war.

And Paul Fussell is a combat veteran of World War II. He has "earned" his right as an historical analyst.

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic is Fussell's own memoir/confession of his actual experience on the ground in the European Theater as an American Infantry show more Lieutenant. It is also scattered throughout with historical background of the Allied ground invasion after D-Day--the crawling horror that was the advance across western Europe towards Berlin.

Fussell says he felt that he owed to his readers his own story in the events of which he has written before.

His own story is honest. It is as tedious as warfare. It is horrific in some details. It is as despicable as is politics. It is as pathetic as a flawed human being can be. It is a confession as well as a memoir.

My already deep respect for Fussell found new fathoms through this profoundly honest retelling of this veteran's story.

Paul Fussell is a flawed human being whose excellent, internationally-acclaimed historical writings were informed by his own less-than-spectacular but tragic experience of the pandemic of warfare. And he helps us to understand this.

Paul Fussell is an American treasure. show less

Paul Fussell's WARTIME (1989) worked well as an "in-between-books" reader for me this past week. I've admired Fussell's work since seeing him (along with his late friend, Sam Hynes) in Ken Burns' PBS special, THE WAR, some years back. I enjoyed his memoir, DOING BATTLE, immensely, and this collection of essays were nearly as good. They don't really have to be read in order either. I skipped around sampling the ones with the most intriguing titles, e.g. "Chickenshit: an Anatomy," and show more "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little," or "Reading in Wartime" and others. None of these pieces disappoint. Because Fussell was there, a combat lieutenant in the European theater, who was seriously wounded, so he knows about the filth and fear, the mud and blood, as well as the boredom interspersed with utter terror. And after the war, like Hynes, he became a writer, professor and knowledgeable historian of his own and other wars. Many of these hard-edged and clear-eyed pieces could be prose companions to Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" or Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, because Fussell draws many apt comparisons here, of his war to the Great War. Fussell aims to explode the myths and patriotic nonsense often glorifying war, and he succeeds to the nth degree. WARTIME deserves to stick around and be read for a long, long time. If more national leaders and politicians read books like this, and took them to heart, there would be fewer wars. Fussell is gone now, but his books will live on - I hope. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

While it's true that Fussell prefers later memoirs to more immediate accounts of the war and doesn't conclusively prove that the First World War was history's first or most ironic war, "The Great War and Modern Memory" remains a wonderfully engaging and useful example of intellectual history. Fussell does a very good, very thorough, and very thoughtful job of examining the mindset of those who fought in the war and describing that era's intellectual climate. Though relatively free of show more statistics and accounts of wartime strategizing, the book is serves as a subtle portrait of the war's multitudinous horrors, which made death more mechanical and, in a sense, less traditionally dramatic than it had ever been before. Fussell writes convincingly about the breach that the book opened up between civilian and military life, homoeroticism before and after the war, how experiences of the war changed our ideas about wartime honor and heroism, and, perhaps most interestingly, examines how soldiers used ironic and theatrical motifs to process experiences that simply couldn't be put into words. Fussell's assertion that the Great War had an extensive influence on how civilian life during the rest of the twenty-first century is probably more controversial, but he ably shows how many of the institutions of modern life (the form letter, for one) were field-tested, so to speak, during that conflict. What I personally enjoyed most about this book is the sense of importance that Fussell lends to his ideas: he makes the poems that soldiers wrote and the self-conceptions their societies had seem as critical as any piece of armament you could name. "The Great War and Modern Memory" does exactly what any academic treatise should: make ideas seem vital and alive. This one should be required reading for students of all things Modernist. show less

An exceptional book, especially for those of us who appreciate the interconnections Fussell makes between literature and war. With a deft hand, he pulls together literary tradition right into the middle of the fray and opens the very heart of the wound. This is the first time I've truly understood war, and I see how it had to be done through literature. This will be a very personal book -- there will be lovers and haters. I can't imagine sitting on the fence on this one.