#war book

[moxyphinx]

SOPHIE OKONEDO as Philippa in WAR BOOK (2011)

[classicbooks101]

Trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[tadpolesonalgae]

📖Book Recs: 🪖🎖️

This is so inappropriate for October but I would deeply recommend reading All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It had been on my radar for a while having seen a couple of relatively recent trailers, but the film looked too intense and graphic for me to stomach. (That and I’m not really a film person)

Warnings: it’s a war book so… general death and misery

Synopsis:

One by one the boys begin to fall…

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

Extract from Chapter 1:

Müller asks him, ‘What did Kantorek say in his letter?’ He Laughs. ‘He calls us “young men of iron”.’ That makes the three of us laugh, though not because it is funny. Kropp curses. He is happy to be able to talk again — And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.

Extract from chapter 4:

Detering raises his rifle and takes aim. Kat knocks the barrel upwards. ‘Are you crazy?’ Detering shudders and throws his gun into the ground. We sit down and press our hands over our ears. But the terrible crying and groaning and howling still gets through, it penetrates everything. We can all stand a lot, but this brings us out in a cold sweat. You want to get up and run away, anywhere just so as not to hear that screaming anymore. And it isn’t men, just horses.

Extract from Chapter 5:

‘Christ almighty,’ says Haie, and his expression softens, ‘the first thing I’d do is pick myself up some strapping great bint, know what I mean, some big, bouncy kitchen wench with plenty to get your hands around, then straight into bed and no messing! Think about it! Proper feather-beds with spring mattresses. I tell you, lads, I wouldn’t put my trousers back on for a week!

Extract from chapter 6:

After a few minutes we hear the first scuffles and scurrying. It gets louder, now it is the sound of lots of little feet. Then the lamps come on and we all lay into the dark mass, which breaks up. The results are good. We shovel what is left of the rats over the edge of the trench and lie in wait again. It works a few more times. By then the beasts have realized, or they have smelt the blood. No more come. All the same, they have taken what is left of the scraps of bread by the morning. In one of the adjacent sectors the rats attacked two big cats and a dog, bit them to death and ate them.

[bookoholic-rosie]

I.

Want.

Florian.

Beck.

[vtgbooks]

J.P. Donleavy THE GINGER MAN 1968 Vtg J.P. Donleavy 60s Vtg World War II

[the-overanalyst]

it's always so fascinating and heartbreaking when a character in a story is simultaneously idolized and abused. a chosen prophet destined for martyrdom. a child prodigy forced to grow up too fast. a powerful warrior raised as nothing but a weapon. there's just something so uniquely messed up about singing someone's praises whilst destroying them.

[adriles]

they are Cancelling me for dealing with my grief as best i can . also for the vicious war Crimes

[ellevandersneed]

finished reading thru The Hundred Years' War On Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance by Rashid Khalidi and I cannot recommend it enough. A lot of people and, very likely, the average person not completely blinded by Islamophobia and/or USamerican/European/British exceptionalism are probably at least moderately sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but I don't know how many of us actually understand the degrees by which Israel is based in settler colonial ideology, how it has continually attempted to subjugate and ultimately eradicate the Palestinian people, and the degree by which the US and Britain (but mostly the US ever since the Six Day War in 1967) have been complicit in this continual genocide.

This book is an amazing comprehensive guide on understanding the conflict and I genuinely think you should give it a read (or listen) if you want to learn more. It is one thing to feel sympathy and to declare support for a cause, but I think it is important to take a step further and educate yourself more on it. A ploy I have seen frequently by zionists is to tell people to "educate themselves" before commenting on this genocide, hoping to instill doubt and encourage silence. Well, here is your chance to educate yourself! I'm obviously biased in favor of this one as it is the first major text on the Palestinian genocide that I have read, but I fully believe in its quality.

You can find this book online in PDF format or, if you prefer, you can purchase a physical copy from many of the large retail bookstores; Barnes & Noble in the US sells it, and so does Waterstones in the UK. There is also an official audiobook that you can either purchase through many of the major audiobook distributors (though I recommend avoiding Amazon if it can be helped), but you can also obtain it via other means if necessary. It's actually currently up on YouTube in its entirety, though I won't link it here in case it gets taken down. (It's really easy to search for, just type in the books title + 'audiobook' into your preferred search engine or on YouTube itself and you'll find it. It's about 10 hours long which is a reasonable length for an audiobook). I'll include a link in this post to an overview/lecture/dialogue with the author Rashid Khalidi on the contents of the book conducted at Brown University in 2020.

I do ask you read this book. I think a lot of people already are. I checked a couple of online libraries that have a limited number of audiobook copies that had all been checked out and that to me implies that people do want to educate themselves. There's a sizeable stack of these books at the local bookstore I ocassionally shop at, front and center on the table in the history and world affairs section. It's not hard to find. I hope you all have a good day or evening and I know that if we all take the time to educate ourselves further and approach this genocide with a deeper understanding, we may be able to do something about it. Emotional pleas are not enough, they must be informed ones as well.

[nightlyteaandpaper]

My whoos in Writers' Land

Writing political intrigue when you are a biology graduate who has no experience in law other than Law and Order: Life on the Street makes for a very interesting adventure.

[nando161mando]

"Famine is a useful word when you do not wish to use words like 'genocide' and 'extermination'."

- Frank O'Connor, Irish author.

[redfirerai]

Bats in their natural habitat

[classicbooks101]

Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[eggdrawsthings]

sketch dump

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The War of the Worlds - art by Edward Gorey (1960)

[mysharona1987]

“Well, Israel aren’t committing war crimes.”

The IDF literally tell you on social media what they are doing. They just don’t think Palestinians are human.

To quote from the film Jennifer’s body: “I don’t have a confession, I have a declaration.”

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

The funny thing about the PJO cabin system is that everyone's always all 'oh the twelve' this and 'the twelve' that but that's absolutely not even remotely accurate. To start, right off the bat it's thirteen, not twelve, because they don't count Hades. But not really because before Percy, there were no big three kids, so we're down to ten active cabins already but it's actually eight because Artemis and Hera don't make demigods.

And of those eight, Mr. D is stuck at camp (thus not really making new demigods all that often) and his only two kids don't even sleep in a cabin, they sleep in the Big House with him.

So, pre-Percy, there are seven active cabins at Camp Half-Blood:

Glee club, the Jocks, the Nerds, the Geeks, the Farmers, the 'Sketchy Kids' and the Popular Kids.

Or, in other words, the Apollo, Ares, Athena, Hephaestus, Demeter, Hermes (and the unclaimed kids) and Aphrodite cabins.

What's cool is that you can already see the cabin dynamics in the show. For example, the Athena cabin allies with the Hermes cabin for the numbers. The Hermes kids plus all the unclaimed kids? It's the biggest cabin in the camp by far. It's a battle strategy. Luke and Annabeth's close relationship is just the cherry on top for Annabeth. It'll be really cool to see how the show develops the differences in the cabins during the series.