According to Wilfrid Sheed, Jones wrote "a first-rate book about World War II which was not even about World War II." From Here to Eternity treats the peacetime "pineapple army" based at Hawaii's Schofield Barracks on the brink of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and Sheed claims it says "more about the war than all the painstaking combat novels put together." For Jones, war is the ultimate social and ideological conflict which must be reduced to personal relevance. His overwhelming issue is American masculinity seen in the context of war, and he focuses best on the doomed Depression-era Army whose ranks absorbed drifters and misfits led by officers willing to purchase promotion at any moral cost. In this harsh crucible long before the democratization of the U.S. Army, Jones tests the qualities for which a U.S. soldier was asked to live and...