Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 288 pages
- Published by: Oxford University Press, USA May 23, 1985
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0195035798
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195035797
Reader ReviewsFussell started out as that most useless and boring thing---an English-department writer---and eventually became an eloquent chronicler of World War 2. (What took him so long? Does he actually expect me to bore myself unto death with stuff about poetic meter and poetic form?) HANDBOOK contains his first forays into WW2-writing. And he saved the best for last. It's a confession called MY WAR and it is a masterpiece of hatred & bitterness: "My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just. The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic: it sorted so ill with modern popular assumptions about the idea of progress and attendant improvements in public health, social welfare, and social justice. To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice."
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