Once There Was a War

Oct 7, 2024 2:20 PM

Author:John Steinbeck

'Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors and, yes, the joys?' Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune when the Second World War was at its height. He begins in England, recounting the courage of the bomber crews, the tragic air-raids and the strangeness of the British, before being sent to Africa and joining a special operations unit off the coast of Italy. Eating, drinking talking and fighting alongside the soldiers, Steinbeck's empathy for the common man is always in evidence in these pieces, and he never fails to evoke the human side of an inhuman war.

'If you have forgotten what the war was like, Steinbeck will refresh your memory. Age can never dull this kind of writing.'

Chicago Tribune

Reviews

The definitive study, meticulous in its scholarship and compulsive in its readability

—— Financial Times

McPherson is wonderfully lucid... Above all, everything is in a living relationship with everything else ... Omitting nothing important, whether military, political or economic, he yet manages to make everything he touches drive the narrative forward ... historical writing of the highest order

—— The New York Times

A distinguished contribution to American history ... He has succeeded brilliantly. He has written what will surely become the standard one-volume history of the great conflict which forged America as a united nation

—— Independent

Absolutely brilliant ... McPherson has fresh approaches to the war's background, the four years of struggle and the aftermath

—— Washington Post Book World

McPherson wears with equal ease the hats of biographer, economist, sociologist and military historian .. Probably the best single-volume history of America's Civil War yet written

—— Economist

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of masterly historical writing.

—— James Walvin

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

—— New York Times

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

—— Colin Grant , Prospect

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

—— Akala's Great Reads

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.

—— Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University

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