Berkshire Wordfest

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a Good (War) Read?

Friday, July 30, 2010

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Check out these recommendations, generously provided by last weekend’s Writers in Wartime panelists.

From Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist John Hockenberry:

  • Sebastian Junger, War
  • Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
  • Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • Michael Herr, Dispatches
  • Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie
  • Graham Greene, The Quiet American
  • Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years
  • Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
  • Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
  • George Packer, Assassin’s Gate
  • Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
  • Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
  • Michael Gordon, Cobra II
  • Thomas Ricks, Fiasco
  • Evan Wright, Generation Kill
  • Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
  • Walt Whitman
  • Wilfred Owen
  • Tony Judt, Postwar
  • Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy
  • Andrew Bacevich, The New American Military
  • Colby Buzzell, My War
  • Matt Gallagher, Kaboom: embracing the suck in a savage little war
  • Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near
  • Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943
  • Craig Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute

From West Point literature professor Elizabeth Samet:

  • U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
  • Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh’s Army
  • Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War
  • Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour
  • A film: Life and Nothing But, directed by Bertrand Tavernier

From novelist Tatjana Soli:

  • Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried; Going After Cacciato; In the Lake of the Woods
  • Michael Herr, Dispatches
  • Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow
  • Perry Deane Young, Two of the Missing

Moderator Frank Delaney read from and recommended Edith Wharton’s own fine collection of war reporting, Fighting France: From Dunkerque To Belport (1915).

To which we at WordFest add the works of each of our wartime panelists: Hockenberry’s Moving Violations; Samet’s Soldier’s Heart; Soli’s The Lotus Eaters; and Delaney’s own lyrical series, which explores the sweep of Irish history: Ireland, Tipperary, Shannon and, most recently, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show.

Many thanks to all who took part! For thoughtful coverage of this panel and other events, read Kate Abbott’s reflections in Thursday’s Berkshires Week.

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