November Books - 16

Years ago on Masterpiece Theater PBS aired a program based on Vera Britain's remembrance of World War I called Testament of Youth. It was then that many of us in the US first discovered Brittain's emotional work.

The book wasn't written until 1933 when the world was beginning to deteriorate again and to move inexorably toward World War II, or as some would have it, the second part of the Great War.

Brittain and her fellow upper class Englishmen were, as Fussell pointed out in The Great War and Modern Memory, deeply disillusioned about the ability of governments to make sensible decisions and to achieve what they set out to do, and so they were pacifists even in the face of the growing menace of Hitler.

Those of us who tend to rant about appeasement and the shortsightedness of those who thought they could cope with Germany without another war need to read about the lives of people like Brittain. She was a nurse during the first war and her experiences were almost unimaginably grim.

Her book gives us a better idea of why so many people were so deeply pacifist in the face of what seems to us today as an obvious threat to freedom.

Comments

[dovegreyreader]

Smart move Mary, love the soft furnishings!

[Fay Sheco]

Mary, I like your new look and will be studying your lay-out as my blog gets underway.

Let's compare notes on Philip Roth as soon as the holiday is over. Not having read any Roth for years, I feared for awhile (in reading _The Human Stain_) that he was going to be one of those male chest thumpers who confuses misanthropy with virility. He's not.

Fay

[Mary Ronan Drew]

Thanks, Dove. I liked your blog look and was trying to find something similar.

md

[Mary Ronan Drew]

Fay, I'm still reading Roth's short stories and will begin his second novel, Letting Go, soon. I find him more complex and less obnoxious than I expected but I'm reserving judgment for the time being.

md