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book_cryptid's review against another edition
4.5
you go out of the world the way you came in: surrounded by people and utterly alone.
if i could quote this entire book here i would. instead have the moments david k. webster actually broke my heart-
god, it's quiet... what a lousy way to leave the world. nobody to say goodbye. nobody who loves you waving from the door... how quiet it is - and godforsaken lonely.
i don't want to hurt anybody, i would say. all i ask of the world is to be left alone.
was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
we were ready to go again, because we could only go forward, never back.
a death without love, a death without hope. god, who invented war?
life isn't worth living if you don't try to make the most of every minute of it. i don't mean being virtuous or successful necessarily, but happy.
if i could quote this entire book here i would. instead have the moments david k. webster actually broke my heart-
god, it's quiet... what a lousy way to leave the world. nobody to say goodbye. nobody who loves you waving from the door... how quiet it is - and godforsaken lonely.
i don't want to hurt anybody, i would say. all i ask of the world is to be left alone.
was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
we were ready to go again, because we could only go forward, never back.
a death without love, a death without hope. god, who invented war?
life isn't worth living if you don't try to make the most of every minute of it. i don't mean being virtuous or successful necessarily, but happy.
btajer9's review
5.0
Beautifully written. The book flows well and Webster's view on the war is interesting and unique.
jolenetang's review
3.0
3.5 stars.
Loved the overall story, and I can tell that Webster is a fantastic writer. Some of the scenes he wrote really came to life in my mind. But while listening to the audiobook version of this, I felt that if I missed one detail I would be really confused for the rest of the chapter. It also wasn't structured in a way that completely made sense. The story ends and then there is an hour or so after that with the narrator reading the letters he wrote home, which repeated multiple parts of the story over again and made it feel like there was a lot of backtracking. I think it could have been better had the letters been incorporated throughout the entire story.
Maybe one day when I have time I'll read the hard copy of this novel and I'll change my rating. Until then, my rating is for the audiobook version.
Loved the overall story, and I can tell that Webster is a fantastic writer. Some of the scenes he wrote really came to life in my mind. But while listening to the audiobook version of this, I felt that if I missed one detail I would be really confused for the rest of the chapter. It also wasn't structured in a way that completely made sense. The story ends and then there is an hour or so after that with the narrator reading the letters he wrote home, which repeated multiple parts of the story over again and made it feel like there was a lot of backtracking. I think it could have been better had the letters been incorporated throughout the entire story.
Maybe one day when I have time I'll read the hard copy of this novel and I'll change my rating. Until then, my rating is for the audiobook version.
jmiae's review against another edition
4.0
Full disclosure, I read this book as a direct result of my affection for the 2001 HBO series Band of Brothers. What's more, I'm a fan of the depiction of David Webster, enough so that when I found out that he wrote a book about his experience in WWII via Wikipedia I decided to try reading my first WWII memoir. I wasn't disappointed, but my reading of it was undeniably and directly influenced by the HBO show. There were soldiers I had never heard of before, and some personalities (Janovek) whose presence in E Company was more established than was depicted in the show, but it was strangely rewarding to see how many of Webster's anecdotes found their way into the screenplay in some form or other.
But HBO adaptation aside, Webster's prose is very good - he has a distinct writing voice that I found as compelling as reading a novel with a good plot. I cannot speak to his book's contribution to the war memoir genre, having only read All Quiet on the Western Front, but he writes with a frankness that doesn't pander to nostalgia or reinforce any of the paltry stereotypes about military life that inundate popular culture these days (here's looking at you, Kong: Skull Island). But perhaps that point is moot. After all, as Stephen Ambrose astutely observes in his foreword, Webster wrote his memoir not too long after returning from Europe, during a time when the country did not want to think about the war (they wanted books with lots of sex - hello baby boomer generation). Fifty years after Webster's untimely death, that perception has changed dramatically. Case in point, my 6th grade class went to see Pearl Harbor (2001) in theatres, and as an eleven-year-old I was quite enamoured with the classy, polished depiction of American society in the 1940s. This is the EAME campaign as it was perceived by someone who experienced it firsthand and who had the talent to write about it lucidly, before Hollywood garnered enough interest in its capitalistic potential to sink its claws into it.
But HBO adaptation aside, Webster's prose is very good - he has a distinct writing voice that I found as compelling as reading a novel with a good plot. I cannot speak to his book's contribution to the war memoir genre, having only read All Quiet on the Western Front, but he writes with a frankness that doesn't pander to nostalgia or reinforce any of the paltry stereotypes about military life that inundate popular culture these days (here's looking at you, Kong: Skull Island). But perhaps that point is moot. After all, as Stephen Ambrose astutely observes in his foreword, Webster wrote his memoir not too long after returning from Europe, during a time when the country did not want to think about the war (they wanted books with lots of sex - hello baby boomer generation). Fifty years after Webster's untimely death, that perception has changed dramatically. Case in point, my 6th grade class went to see Pearl Harbor (2001) in theatres, and as an eleven-year-old I was quite enamoured with the classy, polished depiction of American society in the 1940s. This is the EAME campaign as it was perceived by someone who experienced it firsthand and who had the talent to write about it lucidly, before Hollywood garnered enough interest in its capitalistic potential to sink its claws into it.