Most Popular Books by Paul FUSSELL

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

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.

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.

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.

"A conservative cultural critic with a passion for nude beaches and the Indy 500 auto race, Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) explores some of his pet topics in this miscellany of essays and articles. The title piece, a defense of Truman''s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, generated lively controversy when it first appeared in the New Republic; a spirited exchange from that journal is included here. Elsewhere, Fussell hails George Orwell''s essays as a refreshing counterweight to today''s "theory-ridden" criticism. Mulling the difference between tourists and travelers, he offers disarming observations on travel writers Paul Theroux and John Krich. One piece explores how patriotic fervor thrust Carl Sandburg''s propaganda tracts into the literary limelight. Fussell has quirky, interesting things to say about gun control, war poetry, chivalry and modernism as an offshoot of the "melodrama of the French Revolution""--Publishers Weekly.

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.

"This book might be required reading for all students of poetry because it makes wonderfully clear the relationship of metrics to the formal achievement of meaning ... Fussell''s command of his subject and his never-failing common sense will guarantee ... enrichment for anyone who takes the time to read this book."--Frank Lentricchia, Jr., PoetryDonated by Prabu Vasan.

"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.

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

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.

Fussell writes about an idyllic boyhood shattered by World War II - and the way the war experience changed his perspective on everything that came before and after. His life began in Pasadena, California, a pastoral middle-class sanctuary almost untouched by the Great Depression. He went as an innocent to nearby Pomona College, where he learned about drink and women, and spent afternoons marching on the football field with the ROTC. And then, when the United States entered World War II, the spell was broken. At nineteen he joined the army and began the central event of his life. He endured basic training, became a second lieutenant in the infantry, and, leading his platoon into battle, was seriously wounded. When he recovered, he vowed never to take orders again. His newly subversive sensibility would color all his later years, as a Harvard Ph. D. student, as a professor of literature, and as one of America''s most distinguished commentators on twentieth-century life.

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.