Tales of War

As the bombing campaigns of October 8 made it abundantly clear, we have suddenly become a nation at war. Now, as we struggle to keep ourselves up-to-date on the latest events, turning to the television, the radio, and the newspaper, it also seems like a good time to turn to the bookshelf as well. Countless authors have lent their talents to attempting to understand the meaning of war -- its causes, its purposes, and its consequences -- and many of the greatest works of literature have been produced from such reflection, from The Odyssey to War and Peace to All Quiet on The Western Front to Slaughterhouse 5. While our current situation is strikingly different from all other conflicts our nation has engaged in, and while no one work could ever capture the immense significance of war, the books below may offer some insight into the new conflict at hand.

The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien's collection of interconnected Vietnam stories, based on O'Brien's own recollections, has been hailed as a modern classic, and deservedly so. Going straight to the muck of the deeds and thoughts of the men of the Alpha Company, one of whose members is named Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried is both painfully unrelenting and oddly beautiful. All the while, the author asks the crucial yet ultimately unanswerable question of where truth lies when one writes about both the reality and unreality of war.

Confederates in the Attic
by Tony Horwitz
The Civil War may have ended more than 130 years ago, but the cult of America's greatest battle lives on. Himself fascinated by the war's epic story, Horwitz infiltrates the ranks of costume-clad reenactors (whose main goal is to achieve "period rushes," and ultimately "Civil Wargasm") in order to understand what's behind those who are still fighting for the stars and bars. His quest leads him all over the Old South, from landmarks and battlefields to museums and classrooms. Often hilarious and sometimes frightening, Confederates examines the enduring legacy of war, and the controversial history and mythology it creates.

Johnny Got His Gun
by Michael Herr
From the pen of the famed blacklisted writer came this trenchant critique of the horrors of combat, in which the protagonist Johnny survives World War I, but only as a limbless and faceless testament to the cruelties he endures. As shocking as it was the day it was published in 1939, Johnny Got His Gun -- which quickly went from being an underground classic to a literary phenomenon during Vietnam -- remains the ultimate anti-war novel.

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass
From the 1999 winner for the Nobel Prize in literature comes this brash mega-novel starring Oskar Matzerath, who, as a child in Germany just before World War II, consciously decided to stop growing. With a passion for drum-banging and a voice so shrill that it can shatter glass, Oskar travels from one adventure to the next…from a professional music career, to being an Anarchist leader, to falling in love, and, finally, to being unjustly confined to a mental hospital. Throughout, Grass uses his gift for fabulism and dark humor to attack the madness of war itself, and of the society that creates it in this exuberant and distinctive tale.

Dispatches
by Michael Herr
Like O'Brien in The Things They Carried, Herr uses a fragmentary narrative style to capture the messiness at the heart of life on the ground in Vietnam. This memoir, from his days as a front-lines reporter, is a hallucinatory tour through Herr's own "war as hell" that's filled with rapid-fire swirls of images and stream-of-consciousness urgency. An illuminating timepiece that conveys both the surreal nature of wartime experience as well as the drug-fueled, helter-skelter culture of the time.