The Missing of the Somme
-
-
3.4 • 16 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly, unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This instant classic first published in 1994 and now available in the U.S. by acclaimed British author Dyer (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition) presents an extended "meditation" on the Great War's contemporary and historical meanings. Dyer was one of the first to interpret war in the context of the quest for "memory and meaning" made familiar by Jay Winter and David Gregory. For the British, "the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it," and provided a caesura between a stable past and an uncertain future. Dyer supports his point with an impressive survey of poems, letters, memoirs, and novels, combined with a perceptive analysis of British war memorials, and utilizing extensive citations. He concludes with an elegiac description of a peaceful, isolated Somme battlefield: "where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace." Ironically, Dyer's contribution to making the Great War part of the Matter of Britain also helped transform the Somme into a center of tourism and pilgrimage, vulgar but vital.
Customer Reviews
Thoughtfu & thought-provoking
I actually purchased AND read the book, unlike another reviewer, and I found it to be an interesting analysis of how we remember World War I. It helps to be familiar with poetry of W. Owen, since there are many references to it, but even those who are unacquainted with the poet's work, as I am, will find food for thought here. Worth a read, regardless of your political views on the purpose of this war.
Great book
P.s. I didn't really buy the book
P.s.s. It didn't even out yet when I wrote this
:).
Hahahah
Ha
The Missing of the Somme
I purchased the book but it would not download on my iPad.