Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

Paul Fussell, a distinguished literary historian, served as an infantry officer during World War II, and the experience has haunted him ever since. It has also informed his books, among them The Great War in Modern Memory and Wartime, a book that is part memoir, part cultural-critical study, and that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of conflict. Fussell conjures the small details of battlefield experience -- the way a bird's song falls silent just before an artillery barrage, the curious plunking sound a spinning bullet makes, the drift of smoke over an obliterated village; he also evokes the Zeitgeist of the war years, an era when hometown grocery stores bore signs like this one: "Did you drown a sailor today because YOU bought a lamb chop without giving up the required coupons?"

• The Great War and Modern Memory
• The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (Modern Library Chronicles)
• Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918
• Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic
• Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two: The Geography of Conflict
• From Versailles To Pearl Harbor: The Origins of the Second World War in Europe and Asia
• Teenagers: An American History
• Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
• The American Promise, Value Edition, Volume 2: A History of the United States
• What They Fought For 1861-1865 (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, Louisia)