The Great War and Modern Memory

By: Paul Fussell

Narrated by: James Anderson Foster

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the 20th century's 100 best nonfiction books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.

This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. 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 - with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning - most effectively memorialized World War I as a historical experience.

Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes - in every area, including language itself - brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War.

©2013 Oxford University Press (P)2018 Tantor

Audio not great for first time reader.

I gave this one star for the performance but that is probably not fair to the actual producers of the audiobook. I just think this work is too hard to follow along with with audio alone. The almost constant references to other works made it very difficult for me to understand when I was hearing a quoted work versus Fussell's own words. For someone who has read the book before or is very familiar with the referenced materials (or who is skimming along with the audio) it would probably be a lot easier, but i find that for myself having a hard copy of the book where it was clear when I was reading quoted material and being able to easily page back to understand what work was being quoted and in what context, then I would have gotten far more out of the book. That said I did enjoy the narrator's voice and the production values were good outside of a few times where it was a bit obvious things had been edited in.

Best book ever

A wonderful book that I found to be maturative and developmental for a young man coming of age such as myself. I found this book to be highly intelligent and incredibly relatable. I found great relation with the author and I further highly recommend this book.

Pointless

This book is a pointless selection of WWi writings which rambles about never getting anywhere. It is but the authors opinion of a selection of random writings which express musings and opinions of the war composed by literary nobodys. I kept wondering why this or that bit was chosen and of what value or interest I was presumed to have.

Fascinating Material, Awful Narration

While the author sometimes cites arcane allusions, I found this book enlightening and stimulating for its historical and literary insights, although I would disagree with some of Fussell’s interpretations. It takes the reader on a challenging journey of provocative intellectual considerations.
Unfortunately, the narrator completely misses the tone of the work in his excessively theatrical, overdramatized interpretation that would be more appropriate on a live stage than in this work of such serious intent.
In short, this is a work of thought-provoking content inappropriately narrated.