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› Find signed collectible books: '1914'
Based almost entirely on the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors, told in their own words, and on new or little-known letters, diaries, official reports, and papers, the author weaves together an engrossing and moving picture of what it was like to fight in the British Army in 1914. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The African Queen'
› Find signed collectible books: 'All Quiet on the Western Front'
Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarques masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . .
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.The New York Times Book Review [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Barometer Rising'
Barometer Rising is Hugh MacLennan's enormously ambitious first novel, a closely plotted and compulsively readable book that combines its author's love for nationalist melodrama with the grisly realism of a folk disaster-ballad. Published in 1941, as the Second World War was ripening into its full horror, Barometer Rising looks back to the Halifax of the last year of the First World War, and to one of the worst accidents in Canadian history: the explosion of the munitions ship Mont Blanc, responsible for 1,600 deaths, 9,000 injuries, and the annihilation of much of the city.
The story that MacLennan drapes over this catastrophe is the kind of suspenseful romance that would have made a fantastic Bogart and Bacall vehicle. Penelope Wain, a privileged woman in her late 20s, has found war work as a designer in her father's shipyards. Her male colleagues resent her presence but can't deny her superlative skill. A tough, independent, appealing woman, she still cherishes the memory of her former lover--her cousin Neil Macrae, who was disgraced in the war overseas and reportedly killed. Neil, however, did not die after all, and he has returned to Halifax to find Penelope and clear his name. The explosion of the Mont Blanc, which irrevocably alters the characters' lives, soon interrupts this potboiler of a plot.
MacLennan is a rather heavy-handed writer, fond of epic description and stylized, sentimentalized characters, but Barometer Rising holds together remarkably well. A much more entertaining book than Two Solitudes, it still has much of the intellectual thrust of MacLennan's later work and was one of the finest Canadian novels to appear in the 1940s. --Jack Illingworth [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Battleships of World War I: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Battleships of All Nations, 1914-1918'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Birds Without Wings'
Louis de Bernièress last novel, Corellis Mandolin, was met with the highest praise: Behind every page, said Richard Russo, we sense its authors intelligence, wit, heart, imagination, and wisdom. This is a great book. A. S. Byatt placed the author in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. Now, de Bernières gives us his long-awaited new novel. Huge, resonant, lyrical, filled with humor and pathos, a novel about the political and personal costs of war, and of lovebetween men and women, between friends, between those who are driven to be enemies.
It is the story of a small coastal town in South West Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the peopleChristians and Muslims of Turkish and Greek and Armenian descentwhose lives are rooted there, intertwined for untold years. There is Iskander, the potter and local font of proverbial wisdom; KaratavukIskanders sonand Mehmetçik, childhood friends whose playground stretches across the hills above the town, where Mehmetçik teaches the illiterate Karatavuk to write Turkish in Greek letters. There are Father Kristoforos and Abdulhamid Hodja, holy men of different faiths who greet each other as Infidel Efendi; Rustem Bey, the landlord and protector of the town, whose wife is stoned for the sin of adultery. There is a man known as the Dog because of his hideous aspect, who lives among the Lycian tombs; and another known as the Blasphemer, who wanders the town cursing God and all of his representatives of all faiths. And there is Philothei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherda great love that culminates in tragedy and madness. But Birds Without Wings is also the story of Mustafa Kemal, whose military genius will lead him to victory against the invading Western European forces of the Great War and a reshaping of the whole region.
When the young men of the town are conscripted, we follow Karatavuk to Gallipoli, where the intimate brutality of battle robs him of all innocence. And in the town he left behind, we see how the twin scourges of fanatical religion and nationalism unleashed by the war quickly, and irreversibly, destroy the fabric of centuries-old peace.
Epic in its narrative sweepsteeped in historical factyet profoundly humane and dazzlingly evocative in its emotional and sensual detail, Birds Without Wings is a triumph. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Birdsong'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Born with a Tooth'
Almost a decade after its original publication, award winner and Governor General Literary Award nominee Joseph Boyden's classic book of short stories is finally being reissued. Born With A Tooth, Boyden's debut work of fiction, is a collection of thirteen beautifully written stories about aboriginal life in Ontario. They are stories of love, unexpected triumph, and a passionate belief in dreams. They are also stories of anger and longing, of struggling to adapt, of searching but remaining unfulfilled. The collection includes 'Bearwalker', a story that introduces a character who appears again in Boyden's novel Three Day Road. By taking on a new voice in each story, Joseph Boyden explores aboriginal stereotypes and traditions in a most unexpected way. Whether told by a woman trying to forget her past or by a drunken man trying to preserve his culture, each story paints an unforgettable and varied image of modern aboriginal culture in Ontario. An extraordinary first book, Born With A Tooth reveals why Joseph Boyden is a writer worth reading. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Burden of Desire'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Castles of Steel : Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea'
In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea power in the winning of the Great War.
The predominant image of this first world war is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter. A generation of European manhood was massacred, and a wound was inflicted on European civilization that required the remainder of the twentieth century to heal.
But with all its sacrifice, trench warfare did not win the war for one side or lose it for the other. Over the course of four years, the lines on the Western Front moved scarcely at all; attempts to break through led only to the lengthening of the already unbearably long casualty lists.
For the true story of military upheaval, we must look to the sea. On the eve of the war in August 1914, Great Britain and Germany possessed the two greatest navies the world had ever seen. When war came, these two fleets of dreadnoughtsgigantic floating castles of steel able to hurl massive shells at an enemy miles awaywere ready to test their terrible power against each other.
Their struggles took place in the North Sea and the Pacific, at the Falkland Islands and the Dardanelles. They reached their climax when Germany, suffocated by an implacable naval blockade, decided to strike against the British ring of steel. The result was Jutland, a titanic clash of fifty-eight dreadnoughts, each the home of a thousand men.
When the German High Seas Fleet retreated, the kaiser unleashed unrestricted U-boat warfare, which, in its indiscriminate violence, brought a reluctant America into the war. In this way, the German effort to seize the trident by defeating the British navy led to the fall of the German empire.
Ultimately, the distinguishing feature of Castles of Steel is the author himself. The knowledge, understanding, and literary power Massie brings to this story are unparalleled. His portrayals of Winston Churchill, the British admirals Fisher, Jellicoe, and Beatty, and the Germans Scheer, Hipper, and Tirpitz are stunning in their veracity and artistry.
Castles of Steel is about war at sea, leadership and command, courage, genius, and folly. All these elements are given magnificent scope by Robert K. Massies special and widely hailed literary mastery. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cliffsnotes All Quiet on the Western Front'
In CliffsNotes on All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque takes you inside the gruesome realities of World War I through the eyes of Paul Baumer, a sensitive teenager and typical infantryman in the German army.
This study guide will help you begin to consider how Remarque's views on war might relate to modern-day conflicts. You'll also gain insight into the life and cultural background of the author. Other features that help you study include
Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Deafening'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War'
"A classic [that] covers superbly a whole era...Engrossing in its glittering gallery of characters."CHICAGO SUN-TIMESPulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert K. Massie has written a richly textured and gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century's first great arms race. Massie brings to vivid life, such historical figures as the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz, the young, ambitious, Winston Churchill, the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, and many others. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tratedy in his powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, DREADNOUGHT is history at its most riveting.From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Eye in the Door'
The Eye in the Door is the second installation of Pat Barker's acclaimed and haunting historical fiction trilogy about British soldiers traumatized by World War I trench warfare and the methods used by psychiatrist William Rivers to treat them. As with the other two, the book was recognized with awards, winning the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize. Here, Lieutenant Billy Prior is tormented by figuring out which side of several coins does he live -- coward or hero, crazy or sane, homosexual or heterosexual, upper class or lower. He represents the upheaval in Britain during the war and the severe trauma felt by its soldiers. The writing is sparse yet multilayered; Barker uses the lives of a few to capture an entire society during a tumultuous period. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The First Casualty'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The First World War'
Despite the avalanche of books written about the First World War in recent years, there have been comparatively few books that have concentrated on delivering the big picture--a comprehensive account of the war and its campaigns from start to finish--and this book fills the gap superbly. As readers familiar with John Keegan's previous books, such as the The Face Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, and The Second World War, will know, Keegan is a historian of the old school. He has no earth-shattering new theories to challenge the status quo, no first-person accounts to tug on the emotions; what he does have, though, is the gift for talking the lay person through the twists and turns of a complex narrative in a way that is never less than accessible or engaging. Keegan never tries to ram his learning down your throat. Where other authors have struggled to explain how Britain could ever allow itself to be dragged into such a war in 1914, Keegan keeps it practical. The level of communications that we enjoy today just didn't exist then, and so it was much harder to keep track of what was going on. By the time a message had finally reached the person in question, the situation may have changed out of all recognition. Keegan applies this same "cock-up" theory of history to the rest of the war, principally the three great disasters at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The generals didn't send all those troops to their death deliberately; they did so out of incompetence, ineptitude, and because they had no idea of what was actually going on at the front. Whether deliberate or not, though, the end result was nearly one million dead British and Commonwealth soldiers. The First World War is not afraid to point the finger at those generals who deserve it, but even Keegan has to admit he doesn't have all the answers. If it all seems so obviously futile and such a massive waste of life now, he asks, how could it have seemed worthwhile back then? Why did so many people carry on, knowing they would die? Why indeed. --John Crace [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The First World War: A Complete History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The German High Command at War: Hindenburg And Ludendorff Conduct World War I'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ghost Road'
As World War I winds to a close, two men--Dr. William Rivers, a psychologist whose dedicated healing sends men back to the brutal front, and Billy Prior, a shell-shocked soldier determined to rejoin the final English offensive--are profounded affected by the events of the era. Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Bye to All That: An Autobiography'
The quintessential memoir of the generation of Englishmen who suffered in World War I is among the bitterest autobiographies ever written. Robert Graves's stripped-to-the-bone prose seethes with contempt for his class, his country, his military superiors, and the civilians who mindlessly cheered the carnage from the safety of home. His portrait of the stupidity and petty cruelties endemic in England's elite schools is almost as scathing as his depiction of trench warfare. Nothing could equal Graves's bone-chilling litany of meaningless death, horrific encounters with gruesomely decaying corpses, and even more appalling confrontations with the callousness and arrogance of the military command. Yet this scarifying book is consistently enthralling. Graves is a superb storyteller, and there's clearly something liberating about burning all your bridges at 34 (his age when Good-Bye to All That was first published in 1929). He conveys that feeling of exhilaration to his readers in a pell-mell rush of words that remains supremely lucid. Better known as a poet, historical novelist, and critic, Graves in this one work seems more like an English Hemingway, paring his prose to the minimum and eschewing all editorializing because it would bring him down to the level of the phrase- and war-mongers he despises. --Wendy Smith [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great War and Modern Memory'
The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. 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 most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning.
For this special edition, the author has prepared a new afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Guns of August'
paperback [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Illustrated History of the First World War'
John Keegan's The First World War was everywhere praised, and became the definitive account of the war that created the modern world. The New York Times Book Review acclaimed Keegan as "the best military historian of our day," and the Washington Post called the book "a grand narrative history [and] a pleasure to read."
Now Keegan gives us a lavishly illustrated history of the war, brilliantly interweaving his narrative--some of it derived from his classic work and some of it new--with a brilliant selection of photograps, paintings, cartoons and posters drawn from archives across Europe and America, some published here for the first time. These images take us into the heart of battles that have become legend: Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun, the Somme. They show us the generals' war and the privates' war--young soldiers, away from home for the first time, coming of age under fire.
We see how a civilization at the height of its power and influence crippled itself as the faith in progress, rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment was shattered. We see how four empires--the German, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman--collapsed, and how the seeds for the Second World War were planted. Keegan tells how ambition, mistrust and failures of diplomacy and communication all played a part in allowing this conflict to set ablaze what was then the world's most prosperous society. And he describes how the effects of this war lasted long after it ended; its ghosts still haunt Europe today.
An Illustrated History of the First World War carries us across the Europe of nearly a century ago, revealing the devastation, camaraderie, political machinations and battlefield maneuverings that changed the world. It presents the essential cast of that cataclysmic drama, from the decision makers at the top--Haig, Joffre, Hindenberg, Pershing--to the troops in the trenches. Through its unique amalgam of pictorial and narrative brilliance, the book illuminates the war as no other work has done. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Im Westen Nichts Neues'
Will man den Wehrdienst verweigern und Zivildienst ableisten, dann sollte man in der Gewissensprüfung darlegen können, warum man sich denn keinen Dienst an der Waffe vorstellen kann. Und mehr als einmal dürfte dann als Begründung die Lektüre von Erich Maria Remarques Im Westen nicht Neues folgen.
Dieser Roman schildert aufs Eindringlichste die schauerlichen Erlebnisse des Soldaten Paul Bäumer an der Westfront des Ersten Weltkrieges, wo sich Deutsche und Alliierte in einem grausamen Grabenkrieg gegenüberstanden. Aber eigentlich sind Schauplatz und Zeit bedeutungslos, beherrschend ist das sinnlose Töten und die zu reinem Menschenmaterial degradierten Soldaten, die schon lange den Glauben an den "gerechten Krieg" aufgegeben haben. Hier ist kein Platz für klischeehaft mutige Helden, Verlierer sind sie letztlich alle, die da im Schlamm der Schützengräben liegen.
So mancher Leser wird nach diesem Roman seine Meinung zu Krieg und Militärdienst geändert haben. Wer heute noch glaubt, Krieg könne eine heldenhafte Sache sein, der kennt das Buch wahrscheinlich nicht und sollte einmal einen Blick hinein werfen. Danach ist er entweder eines besseren belehrt oder scheinbar schon völlig abgestumpft. --Joachim Hohwieler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lord of the Nutcracker Men'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magic Ship'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maisie Dobbs'
Lady Rowan Compton first met Maisie when, at thirteen, she went into service as a maid at her ladyships Belgravia mansion. A suffragette, Lady Rowan took the remarkably smart youngster under her wing and became her patron. She encouraged Maisie to study at Cambridge, and was aided in this by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe when discretion and results were required. It was he who first recognized Maisies intuitive gifts.
The outbreak of war changed everything. Maisie left for France to train as a nurse, then served at the front, where she fell in love with a handsome young doctor.
After the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations. Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but turns up something else, a tombstone with only a first nameVincent. And then she finds another. The deceased had lived on a cooperative farm called The Retreat, a well-regarded convalescent refuge for those grievously wounded in the war, ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. When Lady Rowans son makes plans to join the reclusive community, Maisie hurriedly investigates and finds a disturbing mystery at its core whose resolution gives her the courage to confront the ghost that has haunted her for ten years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Naval History of World War I'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Naval War in the Mediterranean 1914-1918'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Lieutenant'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World'
Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 is a colourful, epic history of the momentous days after World War I that saw U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the other Allied leaders reshape the world. Wilson arrived in France to referee the Paris Peace Conference only a month after the war's end, sailing into a French port past an avenue of British, U.S., and French battleships. The world, horrified by the millions of war deaths, was desperate for peace and embraced Wilson's call for a League of Nations and self-determination for all peoples. Enthusiastic European crowds greeted the U.S. president and posters bearing his face lined the streets.
It was a conference unlike any other in history: attendees redrew borders, rewrote international relations, and tried--unsuccessfully--to contain German militarism. It unfolded in the midst of massive social upheaval as Europeans awoke to widespread hunger and the inequalities of their age. In the pressure cooker of Paris, this bubbling stew of social and political forces boiled over, and many of Wilson's dreams were dashed. The world lives with the legacy of these few months. Not only did the conference produce a new map of Europe and the Middle East, it led to the infamous Versailles Treaty, often blamed for provoking World War II. MacMillan, a University of Toronto history professor, argues that the Allied leaders did their best, and to blame World War II on them is to absolve Hitler and his appeasers. MacMillan could perhaps be accused of bias: her great-grandfather was British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, one of the main political players in 1919. However, her book has been acclaimed by historians and has won Britain's richest nonfiction award. Complete with backroom intrigue, personal drama, and vivid characters, Paris 1919 is a vital contribution to our understanding of the last century and the current one. --Alex Roslin [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World'
University of Toronto historian Margaret MacMillan failed at first to find a Canadian publisher for her account of the pivotal peace conference that followed the First World War and, some have said, laid the groundwork for the second, but when Paris 1919 won the Samuel Johnson Prize in the U.K., it returned home a bestseller and remained so for years. MacMillan, great-granddaughter of one of the conference's principals, David Lloyd George, has written a definitive history--authoritative, colourful, and engrossing--of the peace that failed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War'
After the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. At its heart were the three great powers - Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau - but thousands of others came too, each with a different agenda. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes, from Armenian independence to women's rights. Everyone had business that year - T.E. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. There had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since.;For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, or the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, it has been said, failed dismally, and above all failed to prevent another war.Margaret MacMillan argues that they have been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. They tried to be evenhanded, but their goals could never in fact be achieved by diplomacy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Regeneration'
Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear -- the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing -- it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Navel Command'
Foreword by Admiral Sir John Woodward. When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. Although the British fleet was victorious over the Germans, the cost in ships and men was high, and debates have raged within British naval circles ever since about why the Royal Navy was unable to take advantage of the situation. In this book Andrew Gordon focuses on what he calls a fault-line between two incompatible styles of tactical leadership within the Royal Navy and different understandings of the rules of the games. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Siegfried Sassoon: The Making Of A War Poet, A Biography (1886-1918)'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Soldier of the Great War'
On his, last long walk, septuagenarian war hero, deserter, and professor Alessandro Giuliani shares his past with an illiterate young factory worker -- spinning a remarkable tale of heart-stopping escapes, of loves unrequited and won, of madmen, dwarfs, and mafiosi. But overshadowing all is hismost miraculous and terrible adventure, the Great War -- a surreal parade of horrors that devastated and defined Alessandro, yet enabled him to experience fully the magic and beauty of the absurd human comedy called life.
From Mark Helprin bestselling author of Winter's Tale and Memoir from Antproof Case, comes a magnificent epic adventure in which the hero reckons with love, loss, beauty, honor; and mortality. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Testament of Youth'
When war broke out in August 1914, 21-year-old Vera Brittain was planning on enrolling at Somerville College, Oxford. Her father told her she wouldn't be able to go: "In a few months' time we should probably all find ourselves in the Workhouse!" he opined. Brittain had hoped to escape the Northern provinces, but the war seemingly dashed her plans. "It is not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me an infuriating personal interruption rather than a world-wide catastrophe."
Her father eventually relented, however, and she was allowed to attend. By the end of her first year, she had fallen in love with a young soldier and resolved to become active in the war effort by volunteering as a nurse--turning her back on what she called her "provincial young-ladyhood." Brittain suffered through 12-hour days by reminding herself that nothing she endured was worse than what her fiancé, Roland, experienced in the trenches. Roland was expected home on leave for Christmas 1915; on December 26, Brittain received news that he had been killed at the front. Ten months later Brittain herself was sent to Malta and then to France to serve in the hospitals nearer the front, where she witnessed firsthand the horrors of battle. When peace finally came, Brittain had also lost her brother Edward and two close friends. As she walked the streets of London on November 11, 1918--Armistice Day--she felt alone in the crowds:
For the first time I realised, with all that full realisation meant, how completely everything that had hitherto made up my life had vanished with Edward and Roland, with Victor and Geoffrey. The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.
First published in 1933, Testament of Youth established Brittain as one of the best-loved authors of her time. Her crisp, clear prose and searing honesty make this unsentimental memoir of a generation scarred by war a classic. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925'
When war broke out in August 1914, 21-year-old Vera Brittain was planning on enrolling at Somerville College, Oxford. Her father told her she wouldn't be able to go: "In a few months' time we should probably all find ourselves in the Workhouse!" he opined. Brittain had hoped to escape the Northern provinces, but the war seemingly dashed her plans. "It is not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me an infuriating personal interruption rather than a world-wide catastrophe."
Her father eventually relented, however, and she was allowed to attend. By the end of her first year, she had fallen in love with a young soldier and resolved to become active in the war effort by volunteering as a nurse--turning her back on what she called her "provincial young-ladyhood." Brittain suffered through 12-hour days by reminding herself that nothing she endured was worse than what her fiancé, Roland, experienced in the trenches. Roland was expected home on leave for Christmas 1915; on December 26, Brittain received news that he had been killed at the front. Ten months later Brittain herself was sent to Malta and then to France to serve in the hospitals nearer the front, where she witnessed firsthand the horrors of battle. When peace finally came, Brittain had also lost her brother Edward and two close friends. As she walked the streets of London on November 11, 1918--Armistice Day--she felt alone in the crowds:
For the first time I realised, with all that full realisation meant, how completely everything that had hitherto made up my life had vanished with Edward and Roland, with Victor and Geoffrey. The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.
First published in 1933, Testament of Youth established Brittain as one of the best-loved authors of her time. Her crisp, clear prose and searing honesty make this unsentimental memoir of a generation scarred by war a classic. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Day Road'
Joseph Boyden's first novel is the story of two Cree friends, Xavier and Elijah, who leave their pristine northern country to end up in the horrific trenches of World War I. Loosely based on the real life of a famous Canadian sniper, the story is told from two first-person views: those of Xavier and his old aunt and only living relative, Niska. After the war, Niska is taking her wounded nephew back home north to the bush in a canoe. Their trip is the three-day road of the title, which also refers to the journey taken after death. The story of the war is told in flashbacks on this journey as Xavier recovers from morphine addiction. Niska also relates various stories to Xavier, believing there is "medicine in the tale."
Boyden is a natural storyteller. Both the Native tales of the north and the grim accounts of the war in France and Belgium have the ring of truth. His images can be subtly appropriate--raiders who go over the top are "eaten by the night"--and his characterizations are excellent, especially the three main players and Xavier's Canadian trenchmates. Eventually, Elijah seems to feed on the death all around him, becoming a "windigo," while Xavier begins to question the sanity of the war and his friend's growing madness, realizing "we all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy." Not for the squeamish reader, this is a powerful novel that takes a new angle on a popular subject, "the war to end all wars." --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Very Long Engagement'
January 1917: five French soldiers are marched to their own front lines where they will be tossed out into no man's land with their hands tied behind their backs and left for the Germans to shoot. They were, in civilian life, variously a pimp, a mechanic, a farmer, a carpenter, and a fisherman; now they are condemned because each had sought to leave the war by shooting himself in the hand. Taken to a godforsaken trench nicknamed Bingo Crépuscule, the five are reluctantly sent out into the darkness; days later, five bodies are recovered and the families are notified, merely, that the men died in the line of duty.
August 1919: Mathilde Donnay receives a letter from a dying man. In it, the former soldier tells her that he met her beloved fiancé, the fisherman Manech, shortly before he died. Mathilde goes to meet Sergeant Daniel Esperanza at his hospital and there hears the story of the execution. She also receives a package with a photograph of the men and copies of their last letters. As Mathilde reads and rereads the letters and goes over Esperanza's tale, she begins to suspect that perhaps the story didn't end quite so neatly. And so begins her very long investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of five condemned prisoners--one of whom, at least, might not really be dead.
In Mathilde Donnay, Sebastien Japrisot has created one of the most compelling and delightful heroines in modern fiction. Though confined to a wheelchair since childhood, "Mathilde has other lives, varied and quite beautiful ones." She paints, cares for her pets, enjoys a rich fantasy life, and is relentless in her search for the truth about Manech's death. But she is by no means the only vibrant personality leaping off Japrisot's pages. This author has a remarkable ability to draw even minor characters in three dimensions with economy and wit. Take Mathilde's mother, for instance, caught in mid-card game: "At bridge, manille, bezique, Mama is a dirty rotten swine. Not only is she an ace with the pasteboards, but she throws her opponents off their mettle by insulting or making fun of them." And even the characters we meet only through other people's memories--the condemned men--are so fully realized that you find yourself torn over which one you hope may have survived. As Mathilde comes ever closer to solving the mystery of what happened at Bingo Crépuscule that January morning in 1917, Sebastien Japrisot proves himself a master storyteller and A Very Long Engagement a near perfect novel. --Alix Wilber [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'World War I'
The assassination of the archduke of Austria-Hungary in 1914 triggered more than a monstrous war; it set off a revolution so violent that it reshaped the thoughts and affairs of mankind, perhaps for all time. Marshall's book is a clear one-volume history of the "war to end all wars." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Un Long Dimanche De Fiancailles: Roman'
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