Perspective

Paul Fussell, the author, when twenty-years-old, served as an Army lieutenant, leading a rifle platoon in the 103rd Infantry Division in France. He was severely wounded in early 1945. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and has since pursued a career as a literary scholar and critic. He has published nine other books before publishing the current book and has held the Donald T. Regan Chair of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The author's experiences and education yield an instant credibility and authoritative tone to his presentation of the book's theses. Each chapter builds on the book's primary theses and presents a clearly-defined scope within which citations and quotes are used to support the developing thesis. The author clearly believes that warfare is unintelligible in any ordinary sense of the word and that wartime violence is too intense to be comprehended, fully, as a sane process...