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smartipants8's review against another edition
5.0
Remarkably prophetic words about the destructive nature of power and politicians. She covered wars from the Spanish Civil War to WWII to Vietnam to the 6 Day War in the Middle East to the 80s messes in Central America. Her contempt for our leaders who always ignore the poor and the victims of the wars remains strong. She was great and we should still be reading her.
chalicotherex's review
3.0
The point of these articles is that they are true; they tell what I saw. Perhaps they will remind others, as they remind me, of the face of war. We can hardly be reminded too much or too often. I believe that memory and imagination, not nuclear weapons, are the great deterrents. ... Though I have long lost the innocent faith that journalism is a guiding light, I still believe it is a lot better than total darkness.
Mistakenly thought this was just about her experience reporting the Spanish Civil War, which I took an interest in after reading Adam Hochschild's [b: Spain in our Hearts|25897691|Spain in Our Hearts Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939|Adam Hochschild|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447080466s/25897691.jpg|45780660] which has some great stories about her and Hemingway in Spain. (Also, I think Hochschild criticizes Gellhorn specifically for missing the revolutionary aspect of the war, especially in Barcelona, but praises her for getting Eleanor Roosevelt to work on getting FDR to support the war, though he never did.)
But no, the book tracks Gellhorn's whole career: from covering Spain to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist army in China to the Winter War and WW2. Also Indonesia, Vietnam, the Six Day War and Reagan's backing of right wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua, ending with a piece on Chernobyl.
Most of it's good, except for the stuff on Vietnam. Reading it, I had a sense that it sounded overly optimistic, too favourable to the American side, and sure enough: in her epilogue to that section, she admits to having self-censored, thinking that, "even liberal readers in Britain were not prepared for the full true story. The official American version of the war, as a generous effort to save the South Vietnamese people from communism, had been a public relations triumph. To dispute it, by showing what the war was actually doing to the South Vietnamese, risked the label of communist propaganda." And yet she still gets in a sad portrait of a child napalm victim, which was enough to get her blacklisted from Saigon.
Gellhorn has a great Hemingwayesque way of channeling the horrors of war by describing the dead or wounded in simple but visceral terms. Some of those images are going to stick with me. Not for the squeamish.
If you liked this, I recommend checking out Nahlah Ayed's [b: A Thousand Farewells|13485053|A Thousand Farewells|Nahlah Ayed|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329247784s/13485053.jpg|19020542].
Kindle highlights:
No one need point out my contradictions; I know them and feel them. I thought that 1939 was at least three years too late to start fighting Hitler and all his cohorts and everything they did and stood for. Our victory spared us temporarily from unbearable evil; it solved nothing. War, when it has any purpose, is an operation which removes, at a specific time, a specific cancer. The cancer reappears in different shapes, in different parts of the human race; we have learned no preventive medicine for the body of the nations. We fall back, again and again, on nearly fatal surgery. But the human race has always survived the operation and lived.
The first report in this book was written forty-nine years ago. After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers. Only governments prepare, declare and prosecute wars. There is no record of hordes of citizens, on their own, mobbing the seat of government to clamor for war. They must be infected with hate and fear before they catch war fever. They have to be taught that they are endangered by an enemy, and that the vital interests of their state are threatened. The vital interests of the state, which are always about power, have nothing to do with the vital interests of the citizens, which are private and simple and are always about a better life for themselves and their children. You do not kill for such interests, you work for them.
The Canadian troops which I had seen two days ago, going in to attack the Gothic Line, were now swimming in the Adriatic. The beaches were laced with barbed wire but holes had been cut through it and engineers appeared with the curious vacuum-cleaner-like mine detectors, to sweep the beach. The infantry, sunburned the color of expensive leather, beautifully strong, beautifully alive, were bouncing around the flat warm sea and racing over the sand as if there were nothing terrible behind them and nothing terrible to come. Meantime you could sit on the sand with a book and a drink of sweet Italian rum and watch two British destroyers shelling Rimini, just up the coast; see German shells landing on the front three kilometers away; follow a pilot in a slowly sinking parachute, after his plane had been shot down; hear a few German shells whistle overhead to land two hundred yards farther down; and you were getting a fine sunburn and life seemed an excellent invention.
Arresting collaborators is as much a part of cleaning up a town as is the maintenance of the sewage system and the street sweeping
Get the feeling she supported the Morgenthau Plan:So the moral of this story is really short: it would be a good thing if the Germans were never allowed to make war again.
But there was much excitement in the headquarters shack; a tall towheaded boy with a shining face was passing a box of cigars around and getting heavily beaten on the back. His smile was enormous and he couldn't give out cigars fast enough. A cable had just come, announcing the birth of a baby daughter.
“Thank God,” said the Major, “I've been sweating out that baby for ten days.”
The towheaded pilot showed his cable and a picture of his wife and offered his cigar box.
“How long is a baby?” he said. He held his hands about three feet apart. “That long?”
“Hell, no,” said an elderly father of twenty-four. “About so long.” And he held his hands a foot apart.
There followed a heated argument about the length of babies. No one spoke of the mission completed or of the missions to come; it was after all just another night's work. But people didn't become fathers every night; becoming a father was really something.
The stunning news of the A-bombs, immediately followed by the stunning news of Japan's surrender, came over the radio in St. Louis where I was visiting my mother and dawdling on my way to the Orient. Like everyone else, I had no idea what these bombs were, but was deeply uneasy: since when did two bombs have such an effect? Innumerable tons of bombs had never produced final results. I remember walking up and down the poorish average-income streets of the city, ringing doorbells and asking housewives in curlers and men in undershirts what they thought; how about these new bombs, I kept saying, what do you think? They were uneasy too, and talked of saving our boys and bringing them home and it was fine the war was ended, but their faces and voices were troubled. People weren't throwing their hats in the air and shouting with joy over those bombs, even then, when wild celebration might have been expected.
A Dutchman had told me about Walcheren Island (where so many Canadians died to drive out the Germans) and he said not a tree was left alive in the flooded wasteland of Walcheren. But hundreds of thousands of Dutch people contributed a dollar each to buy a tree, and if there was peace and the island was not flooded again, the trees would grow. . . . The Dutch did not fear that anyone wanted to harm them, as they wanted to harm no one. It was the great nations who feared and made fear; and we looked at each other with sadness, for I belong to a great nation and am no different from him, and we knew it, and we knew that this was true of most of the people of the world.
I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The same half-naked skeleton who had been dug out of the death train shuffled back into the doctor's office. He said something in Polish; his voice was no stronger than a whisper. The Polish doctor clapped his hands gently and said, “Bravo.” I asked what they were talking about.
“The war is over,” the doctor said. “Germany is defeated.”
We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.
The camp leader said, casually, that they had had cholera and plague in this camp but were now vaccinated. Plague is beyond my imagination, but I will never forget one close sight of cholera in China: a peasant woman staggering towards us like a drunk, then vomiting a torrent of blood, and falling in it, unconscious or dead. It is amazing that the refugees stay sane.
As citizens, I think we all have an exhausting duty to know what our governments are up to, and it is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect. Gloomily, because otherwise I would be ashamed of myself, I made the small effort of a detour to El Salvador.
In 1945, the U.S. had produced three nuclear weapons, the A-bombs; one tested, two used. After the Japanese surrender, the end of the Second World War, there was no need or excuse for more of these weapons. It was the moment to decide in favor of the human species and the planet earth: STOP NOW. Bulldoze Los Alamos, knock the installations flat, smash the machinery, burn the records, threaten anyone who might pass on information with high treason. Sow the place with salt for good measure. I like to believe that Franklin Roosevelt would have done it. He could have, with no complaints from the citizenry. Americans, whose war was particularly in the Pacific, hated Japan, but those bombs felt wrong, unnatural, too doom-laden, long before we understood just how different they were from all previous killing tools.
(1987 edition)
Mistakenly thought this was just about her experience reporting the Spanish Civil War, which I took an interest in after reading Adam Hochschild's [b: Spain in our Hearts|25897691|Spain in Our Hearts Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939|Adam Hochschild|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447080466s/25897691.jpg|45780660] which has some great stories about her and Hemingway in Spain. (Also, I think Hochschild criticizes Gellhorn specifically for missing the revolutionary aspect of the war, especially in Barcelona, but praises her for getting Eleanor Roosevelt to work on getting FDR to support the war, though he never did.)
But no, the book tracks Gellhorn's whole career: from covering Spain to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist army in China to the Winter War and WW2. Also Indonesia, Vietnam, the Six Day War and Reagan's backing of right wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua, ending with a piece on Chernobyl.
Most of it's good, except for the stuff on Vietnam. Reading it, I had a sense that it sounded overly optimistic, too favourable to the American side, and sure enough: in her epilogue to that section, she admits to having self-censored, thinking that, "even liberal readers in Britain were not prepared for the full true story. The official American version of the war, as a generous effort to save the South Vietnamese people from communism, had been a public relations triumph. To dispute it, by showing what the war was actually doing to the South Vietnamese, risked the label of communist propaganda." And yet she still gets in a sad portrait of a child napalm victim, which was enough to get her blacklisted from Saigon.
Gellhorn has a great Hemingwayesque way of channeling the horrors of war by describing the dead or wounded in simple but visceral terms. Some of those images are going to stick with me. Not for the squeamish.
If you liked this, I recommend checking out Nahlah Ayed's [b: A Thousand Farewells|13485053|A Thousand Farewells|Nahlah Ayed|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329247784s/13485053.jpg|19020542].
Kindle highlights:
Get the feeling she supported the Morgenthau Plan:
“Thank God,” said the Major, “I've been sweating out that baby for ten days.”
The towheaded pilot showed his cable and a picture of his wife and offered his cigar box.
“How long is a baby?” he said. He held his hands about three feet apart. “That long?”
“Hell, no,” said an elderly father of twenty-four. “About so long.” And he held his hands a foot apart.
There followed a heated argument about the length of babies. No one spoke of the mission completed or of the missions to come; it was after all just another night's work. But people didn't become fathers every night; becoming a father was really something.
“The war is over,” the doctor said. “Germany is defeated.”
We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.
(1987 edition)
nikkigee81's review
4.0
After reading a biography of Martha Gellhorn, which had some snippets of her writing, I was interested in reading one of her books.
The Face of War is a collection of essays that Martha wrote for Collier's and other publications as a war correspondent - in Spain first and then during World War II and even Vietnam.
Gellhorn gets the reader right into the heart of the matter - the atmosphere, and most especially, the people, most of the time the regular townfolks living the best they can under fear and tyranny.
The Face of War is a collection of essays that Martha wrote for Collier's and other publications as a war correspondent - in Spain first and then during World War II and even Vietnam.
Gellhorn gets the reader right into the heart of the matter - the atmosphere, and most especially, the people, most of the time the regular townfolks living the best they can under fear and tyranny.
theinquisitxor's review against another edition
4.0
I read the Spanish Civil War and WWII sections for one of my classes
raoulherbert's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
iceangel9's review against another edition
4.0
The famous war correspondent collects a selection of her articles that range from the Spanish War of the 1930s to the wars in Central America in the 1980s. It is interesting to see her hawkish attitude towards Hitler and the Axis powers during WWII become increasingly more anti-war as time goes on. A fascinating look at the causes and consequences of war.
otiva's review against another edition
5.0
"Our government belongs to us. We are not little mice anymore." - The Face of War is a masterpiece and Martha Gellhorn is a real live SUPERHERO. She taught me that as a writer I should always use my skill for good. And that sometimes the most important writing is born out of fear and a hysteric need to be of use when the world is falling apart. Take your time reading this. Read sentences again. Reread the chapters if it feels right.
sookieskipper's review against another edition
4.0
The Face of War is a book that's going to be relevant for a very long time. Simply put, Gellhorn puts faces and humanness to war and not politics. All the anecdotes she recounts is that of people on all sides of war, the people, the military and people in position of power. She makes explicit difference between country and government and urges her readers to do so as well. It's something that we all seem to have forgotten and this journalist shoehorned it early in the introduction itself.
There are plenty of lines that can be quoted from gellhorns very passionate verbiage but that would mean quoting a quarter of the book here. I urge people to read this, understand the nuances of war and see that war is more than just ideology and sides.
There are plenty of lines that can be quoted from gellhorns very passionate verbiage but that would mean quoting a quarter of the book here. I urge people to read this, understand the nuances of war and see that war is more than just ideology and sides.
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