War has interested–and frightened–me ever since I was a little boy in the latter-day stages of the Cold War, when I learned that the fate of the world depended on a couple of old men who, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, were standing knee-deep in gasoline and holding lit matches. From then I sought to learn about war, why and how it occurs, and what pushes people to fight. I knew from a young age that I was going to become a novelist, and that one of my novels (my first one, it turns out) was going to be about war. The following books helped me in writingA Beckoning War.
This book is a personal memoir of Canadian author Farley Mowat, who joined the Canadian Army and fought as part of the First Canadian Infantry Division throughout the Sicilian and Italian Campaigns in World War Two. It is a vivid testimonial to losing your innocence under fire, and it strongly personalizes the sort of history that sometimes seems impersonal when preserved in black-and-white documentaries and archived in massive coffee-table books compiled for curious dads. This book was a definite influence on me in the early stages of writing my book, helping me learn more about the day-to-day life of Canadian soldiers at the time–how they talked (and swore!), what they carried, and what they thought and felt after killing the enemy or seeing their friends killed. Highly recommended.
Turned away from the Royal Canadian Air Force for his apparent youth and frailty, Farley Mowat joined the infantry in 1940. The young second lieutenant soon earned the trust of the soldiers under his command, and was known to bend army rules to secure a stout drink, or find warm -- if nonregulation -- clothing. But when Mowat and his regiment engaged with elite German forces in the mountains of Sicily, the optimism of their early days as soldiers was replaced by despair. With a naturalist's eyes and ears, Mowat takes in the full dark depths of war; his moving…
Boll, a Second World War veteran, tells this episodic story from the perspective of a German soldier during the last year of the war. Loosely episodic and propelled by a kind of grim, fatalistic absurdity, it follows the hapless infantryman Feinhals as he lurches from misadventure to misadventure on the Eastern Front. What really stuck with me is the awfulness of the predicaments Feinhals finds himself in, such as the moment when a soldier sets out to surrender a hospital full of wounded men, only to accidentally set off a dud shell beside the hospital’s cesspool. The Soviets, thinking they have been attacked, respond by levelling the place. "This war’s a load of shit," says one cynical character, and with a magnificent kaboom, that statement becomes literal.
This book, by celebrated author and war veteran Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an unassuming young man who ends up in the US Army in World War Two and is promptly captured. He ends up surviving the horrific firebombing of Dresden as a POW, and he becomes “unstuck in time,” time travelling throughout his increasingly sad life courtesy of an alien race called the Tralfamadorians. There is enough mental dissociation in Pilgrim's life and in his mind to suggest that the whole time-travel-and-aliens device is an intricate delusion of Billy’s rather than something that is literally happening–and it works amazingly either way you interpret it. This book is proof that you don’t need to be completely factual in order to be completely true.
A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…
This book is poet Robert Graves’ personal memoir of his service with the British Army during and just after the First World War. This book really moved me. What you really get from it is a sense of how war can completely change someone's psyche. It is full of insight and pathos and unsettling imagery, as depicted when Graves sees the ghosts of dead soldiers that he recently fought with as he marches down the road. Later, after he is sent back to England, he looks at the peaceful landscape and his mind tries to work out where in this setting he would deploy his machine guns, the war and its demands having gotten to the bottom of his soul.
On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of one of the best and most famous memoirs of the conflict.
Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had…
I discovered this classic First World War novel in a bookcase in our crowded basement rec room when I was eleven. I read from it anytime I went down there, and it really impressed itself upon my consciousness and helped inspire me to (eventually) write my own modern war story. In it, Paul Baumer, a sensitive German high school student and patriot, joins the German Army at the behest of a patriotic teacher, and he soon finds himself embroiled in the chaos and carnage of the Western Front. There is no plot, really, just the story of a young man being hardened into a soldier in the worst possible conditions, losing friends on a daily basis, and in the end just trying to survive until the impending armistice.
The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war; under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war - of any war - told for a whole generation of victims.
Captain Jim McFarlane, a Canadian infantry officer, is coming apart at the seams. It’s September 1944, in Italy, and the allied armies are closing in on the retreating Axis powers. Exhausted and lost, Jim tries to command his combat company under fire while waiting desperately for letters from his wife Marianne. Joining the army not out of some admirable patriotic sentiments but rather because of his own failings and restlessness, he finds himself fighting in a war that is far from glorious.
Farley Mowat based his beautiful and wrenching anti-war memoir, And No Birds Sang, on the Italian campaign in World War II. Now with echoes of war ringing again, Matthew Murphy has taken the same campaign to tell a story of love and war, brilliantly capturing our ambiguous relationship to war.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
