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fallona's review
3.0
Probably the most I've ever thought about the meaning of a book's title in relation to its text while reading it.
It's an interesting little book about memorialization and remembrance, and particularly about the author's experience of what remembrance of the First World War looked like in the early 1990s and how it's handled in books he'd read.
It's an interesting little book about memorialization and remembrance, and particularly about the author's experience of what remembrance of the First World War looked like in the early 1990s and how it's handled in books he'd read.
librarianonparade's review against another edition
4.0
'm not really sure how to describe this book. It's not memoir, not history, not travelogue, not literary criticism, although it contains elements of all of those things. If I had to describe it as anything it would be as the written tracings of one man's interior meditation on the Great War, a personal elegy, of sorts.
Beautifully written, this is a book about war and memory and how we remember; or perhaps it would be more appropriate to write, how we approach Remembrance with the intention of remembering. It meanders from Armistice Day and the Cenotaph to the Great War cemeteries, winding all along the old line of the Western Front, Thiepval and Vimy Ridge and Tyne Cot. Drawing on Sassoon, Owen and Remarque along the way, Dyer dwells on how we can adequately remember something that cannot be explained or expressed, how anyone can remember something that only the dead experienced - the true silence at the heart of Remembrance.
Beautifully written, this is a book about war and memory and how we remember; or perhaps it would be more appropriate to write, how we approach Remembrance with the intention of remembering. It meanders from Armistice Day and the Cenotaph to the Great War cemeteries, winding all along the old line of the Western Front, Thiepval and Vimy Ridge and Tyne Cot. Drawing on Sassoon, Owen and Remarque along the way, Dyer dwells on how we can adequately remember something that cannot be explained or expressed, how anyone can remember something that only the dead experienced - the true silence at the heart of Remembrance.
raehink's review against another edition
4.0
An excellent examination of the Great War and how it has come to be memorialized. A memorable read.
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