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zenithharpink's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 stars. This was book was as expected, which is to say, disappointing. I haven't really enjoyed the other two and I wasn't expecting this book to be much different. While these are well-written, these really just haven't been compelling to me. There isn't really a plot, this is more a fictionalized memoir.
Also, there was A LOT of sex in this book, and I found it to be more distracting and unnecessary than actually assisting with the narrative. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I truly couldn't understand why sex featured so highly in this book. It felt like there was a lack of content and this was a gap-filler, but this is me.
I suppose I would recommend this to fans of the series, but I'm not sure who else to recommend this to. This is really no my favorite.
Also, there was A LOT of sex in this book, and I found it to be more distracting and unnecessary than actually assisting with the narrative. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I truly couldn't understand why sex featured so highly in this book. It felt like there was a lack of content and this was a gap-filler, but this is me.
I suppose I would recommend this to fans of the series, but I'm not sure who else to recommend this to. This is really no my favorite.
erin_oriordan_is_reading_again's review
4.0
A great read, and a fine, fitting ending to the wartime trilogy Jones began with [b:From Here to Eternity|116114|From Here to Eternity|James Jones|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1330924946s/116114.jpg|2504920] - but the ending is really a bummer. I especially wanted something much, much better for Robert E. Lee Prewitt/Bob Witt/Bobby Prell.
zenithharpink's review
2.0
2.5 stars. This was book was as expected, which is to say, disappointing. I haven't really enjoyed the other two and I wasn't expecting this book to be much different. While these are well-written, these really just haven't been compelling to me. There isn't really a plot, this is more a fictionalized memoir.
Also, there was A LOT of sex in this book, and I found it to be more distracting and unnecessary than actually assisting with the narrative. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I truly couldn't understand why sex featured so highly in this book. It felt like there was a lack of content and this was a gap-filler, but this is me.
I suppose I would recommend this to fans of the series, but I'm not sure who else to recommend this to. This is really no my favorite.
Also, there was A LOT of sex in this book, and I found it to be more distracting and unnecessary than actually assisting with the narrative. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I truly couldn't understand why sex featured so highly in this book. It felt like there was a lack of content and this was a gap-filler, but this is me.
I suppose I would recommend this to fans of the series, but I'm not sure who else to recommend this to. This is really no my favorite.
fourtriplezed's review
4.0
A fine read indeed. The third and final of Jones soldier trilogy. I was not expecting this to reach the heights of From Here to Eternity, few novels can, but this was certainly up there with The Thin Red Line.
Anyone that writes a suicide that makes the hairs stand on end knows how to write. This is not a book for the faint hearted and as one gets through the story of the 4 protagonists one senses that their life of, by some standards, depraved sexual needs, booze culture, their endless nightmares of things that they as young men (and old) should not see is sending them over the edge.
The death of the author prior to finishing the final three chapters is obviously disappointing but I for one am not a critic of the publisher for the overview that was written from the Jones descriptions of what he intended prior to his passing. Why should anyone attempt to write in his style anyway. This would have made the book a false record of what he had to say about post traumatic stress disorder anyway.
Anyone that writes a suicide that makes the hairs stand on end knows how to write. This is not a book for the faint hearted and as one gets through the story of the 4 protagonists one senses that their life of, by some standards, depraved sexual needs, booze culture, their endless nightmares of things that they as young men (and old) should not see is sending them over the edge.
The death of the author prior to finishing the final three chapters is obviously disappointing but I for one am not a critic of the publisher for the overview that was written from the Jones descriptions of what he intended prior to his passing. Why should anyone attempt to write in his style anyway. This would have made the book a false record of what he had to say about post traumatic stress disorder anyway.
carson2031's review
4.0
Again there are moments in this book that moved me profoundly. Overall not amazing, but with some amazing moments.
robynne's review
4.0
This is the third and final book in Jones's war trilogy. Published posthumously after Jones's death of congestive heart failure at the age of fifty-five, Whistle along with its companions From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, provides what Jones claims is "just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us" (xxi). It is not a joyous account. Frankly, it's pretty depressing. Here we have the return of wounded soldiers to hospitals in the United States where they're patched up to be redeployed or discharged from duty. Based as it was on Jones's own experience in WWII, this book highlights the return of four soldiers from the Pacific arena (specifically the Guadalcanal and New Georgia campaigns) to a US that is preparing for D-day. Of the four characters featured in this concluding novel, three commit suicide in some form or another and the fourth goes crazy. In the time in between their arrival home as "heroes" and their end in suicide or insanity, there's a lot of alcohol and sex to take their minds off the horrors of battle, the fear of killing and being killed, the manufactured production of "war heroes," and the ever-present nightmares. And that's what Jones wants to say on the "human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us" -- the experience of modern, mechanized war is a whole lot different than the constructed heroic use to which society puts it.
The writing is coarse and raw. It will be offensive to many, but I expect that too was Jones's purpose -- to offend readers in order to draw attention to the realities of warfare. This is Jones's political philosophy, forged in the fire of battle and modern war. Consider this example, from the point of view of the character Landers who is facing imminent redeployment:
Jones gives us none of the valour and honour of war memorialized in our monuments of war. The production of these qualities in the war bonds tour onto which Prell was dispatched makes that crystal clear. The cynicism that permeates the narrative does not mean readers do not encounter courage and heroism. Caught in the melee of gunfire, readers should draw a lesson from the expectations society places on those we ask to kill and die for us. Jones's describes the complex spectrum of emotions experienced by soldiers in combat.
Jones wants to say a lot about war and warfare and what we make of it. In this, his final work, he reminds us that the burden we ask combat soldiers to bear is immense, and it seems to be harshest for those who survive to tell its sordid tale.
The writing is coarse and raw. It will be offensive to many, but I expect that too was Jones's purpose -- to offend readers in order to draw attention to the realities of warfare. This is Jones's political philosophy, forged in the fire of battle and modern war. Consider this example, from the point of view of the character Landers who is facing imminent redeployment:
Their time together was running out. Their common interests changed. He would be alone, when he went back into the fire. As they all would be. If they went back at all to it. ... It was funny but in each case it was a woman who had pulled them away. Females. Pussy. Cunt. Had split the common male interest. Cunt had broken the centripetal intensity of the hermetic force which sealed them together in so incestuous a way. Their combat. Cunt vs combat. In his cups Landers decided he had discovered quite by accident the basic prevailing equation of the universe. If the universe represented by a floating compass, and the cock is a sliver of iron rubbed on a magnet, it will always point due North to cunt. Always. No matter what. This was the equation modern man had broken, to his peril, with this creation and introduction of mechanized, social, group combat, for some fucking damned cause or another (312).
Jones gives us none of the valour and honour of war memorialized in our monuments of war. The production of these qualities in the war bonds tour onto which Prell was dispatched makes that crystal clear. The cynicism that permeates the narrative does not mean readers do not encounter courage and heroism. Caught in the melee of gunfire, readers should draw a lesson from the expectations society places on those we ask to kill and die for us. Jones's describes the complex spectrum of emotions experienced by soldiers in combat.
Anguish. Love, And hate. And happiness. The anguish was for himself. And every poor slob like him, who had ever suffered fear, and terror, and injury at the hands of other men. The love, he didn't know who the love was for. For himself and everybody. For all the sad members of this flawed, misgotten, miscreated race of valuable creatures, which was trying and failing with such ruptured effort to haul itself up out of the mud and dross and drouth of its crippled heritage. And the hate, implacable, unyielding, was for himself and every other who had ever, in the name of whatever good, maimed or injured or killed another man. The happiness? The happiness was the least, and best, and most important, because the most ironic. The happiness was from those few moments in the fight, when the bars were down, when the weight of responsibility lifted, and he and every man could go in, and destroy and be destroyed, without fear of consequences, with no thought of debt. In short, do all the things they shouldn't and couldn't want to do, or want others to do, when they were responsible. What a melange. All tossed up in the air and churned around until one element was indistinguishalbe from another, and the steam from the whole boiling stew seethed and billowed until its pressure forced a safety crack in even the strongest self-control (245).
Jones wants to say a lot about war and warfare and what we make of it. In this, his final work, he reminds us that the burden we ask combat soldiers to bear is immense, and it seems to be harshest for those who survive to tell its sordid tale.
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