Rating: 
Summary: Could have been a great book...
Review: This book is well written, but the arrogance and elitism of the author kept me from completely enjoying the read. His premise, to completely walk the Western Front of World War I is interesting, but he allows his extreme pacifist views to negatively color the events of that war. While the war was terrible, I have severe issues with statements the author makes such as "the only true heroes of the war are the mutineers" who refused to fight. This is a profoundly absurd statement, and completely insults the memory of the many brave men who died in the war. I don't recommend not reading the book, but be prepared that this statement and other similar ones will be encountered.
Rating: 
Summary: best book I read in 1997
Review: This book tells of what the author sees so well that it makes a supremely interesting account. In 1997 I read an even 100 books and this book captured the award for "best book read in 1997"
Rating: 
Summary: Read this book.
Review: This book was terrific. O'Shea concedes at the outset that he is no professional historian, and that his book is neither definitive history or the new reference work of choice. That having been said, what this book is is an extraordinarily well-written and provocative account of the author's informed indictment of a senseless war. Obviously WWI was a debacle; what O'Shea does is explain (in remarkably short time) why exactly the war was such and what it meant then and continues to mean to us today. If you glance at this book you might take it for a travel diary; superficially, it is. (And a helpful one at that.) Yet having read the book now from cover to cover (and having re-read much of it two or three times), I am amazed by O'Shea's ability to weave into this work several different topics of thought. Firing off salvos on issues from nationalism to colonialism to conservation to the insecurity of modern France (all wrapped up in a hatred of war in any form), O'Shea gives his excellent read a very worthwhile underpinning that makes the book more than just the cause of my new desire to visit the Western Front ASAP.
Rating: 
Summary: Overwritten Observations, Personal Thoughts, Some History
Review: This could have been an interesting book. The author is attempting to do the same thing Tony Horwitz did with "Confederates in the Attic". He fails.Where Horwitz used a journey through the old Confederacy to explore the grip of the Civil War on today's South (in a very poingnant and witty way), O'Shea uses his trip to to display gratuitous vocabulary, overwritten place and setting descriptions and his world view on topics that sometimes pop into his head. Most annoying are his swipes at his personal collection of people and places that obviously fail to embrace his world view (such as a slap at Lynchburg, VA that appears, unconnected in the middle of one passage). His excesses are distracting -- in short the author inserts much too much of himself in a book that would have been better if it had focused more on what the front is like today and what impact it still had on those who live along it. Some interesting historic nuggets and vingettes do appear in the book and they are sometimes fascinating. The Great War still has the power to move with its farce and tradgedy. The book should have focused more on this aspect.
Rating:
Summary: Mr. O'SHea is no historian
Review: This is a hard book to review.
I liked many parts of it. It's unique, as I have never found another book where the author walked the entire front line of WWI.
I hated many parts of it. The author is not a pacifist, as many have described him. He is without question the most vehemently anti-military person I have ever heard of. As far as I can tell, Mr. O'Shea thinks everyone in a uniform (probably to include Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army) has a single-digit IQ, while WWI generals had IQ's that amoebas would not envy.
Mr. O'Shea is quite simply the biggest hypocrite I have ever run into. Mr. O'Shea, a Canadian of Irish background, enjoys living in France, making a living writing for American and British magazines. I seriously doubt that he would enjoy it as much if France as run by people in feldgrau uniforms with pointed helmets (WWI Germans) or if French culture included saluting flags with swastikas on them. Yet this is what would have happened if the `morons' in the military hadn't beat the Germans twice in the last century.
The book would have been far more enjoyable if his anti-military diatribe wasn't repeated page-after-page-after-page. In fact, it's hard to find a page in which his personal views are not repeated again and again. And that the real problem, they are his personal views, not facts or the result of learned analysis.
Mr. O'Shea is not a historian. While he lists a nice collection of books for further reading (and he even continues his diatribe in this part of the book), it's obvious that he does not REALLY understand the plight of WWI generals. One hundred years before, at Waterloo, Wellington could see and control the entire battle from atop a hill. Thirty years later, WWII generals had radios and other methods of seeing and controlling a battle that stretched many miles beyond his view. WWI generals were in a bad time in history. Weapons were much more deadly than they had been 100 years before, and the range at which they could cause damage had expanded greatly. And armies were much larger, and thus battlefields were larger. Yet the ability of generals to control battles had not kept pace. Portable radios did not exist, identical signal flares were used by both sides, and phone wires broke as soon as battles started. So what was a general to do? They relied on runners and carrier pigeons (yes, carrier pigeons!) to carry messages. This meant that messages often took as much as five hours to reach them, and were thus useless to stopping an advance or changing the point of attack. So, generals planned battles, and then had to hope for the best. They had the technology to kill, but not control.
Nowhere does Mr. O'Shea bring this up. He never mentions the difficulties that the generals faced. He acts as though the generals were the coldest, cruelest people on the earth, and did not care how many people died in battle. To get this information read "The First World War" by John Keegan, heavens knows that Mr. O'Shea needs to!
What I hoped I got when I purchased this book was, at least in part, a listing of where and how to best see WWI battle fields, a description of the current appearance of WWI battlefields, where to see recreated trenches (if they exist) and the like. What I got was a sounding board for a complete and total hypocrite, one who enjoys the fruit of victory while condemning and demeaning those who achieved it.
Rating: 
Summary: Boomer blows it
Review: This is a reductionist view of WW I seen through the eyes of a smug baby boomer who by his own admission has just discovered history. O'Shea has reduced this complex and horrific war--and its major actors--to a simple morality play. The prose is often purple and the tone of the book is self-righteous and contemptuous. I would agree with O'Shea that war is bad, and WW I was especially so, but this book offers no insights beyond these platitudes.
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Summary: The Western Front 80 years later.....
Review: This is a relatively short, expertly done travelogue through time from 1914 to the present among the olden battlefields of France and Belgium of the Great War. The author has no illusions of what a "glorious war" this was. Journeying 450 miles from the Channel to the Swiss border through such towns and rivers as Somme, Marne, Passendaele, Ypres, Verden , and lesser known places, this is real time travelling trip through history. The savagery of these battles is almost too immense for the author to describe, and the hundreds of cemetaries, ossuaries, monuments become near overwhelming, along with the awesome numbers of dead and wounded. And he is not shy in describibg the incredible arrogance of the generals (mainly Brit and French) who ordered some of these massacres. So for a short ride back in time and place, and to discover the chaos and death commonplace in these 85-plus year old catastrophes, this is a fine book and mesmorizing journey.
Rating:
Summary: A fine tramp through Flanders fields
Review: This is a strange mixture of John Hillaby and Barabara Tuchman, with maybe a little Bruce Chatwin thrown in for good measure. I read it very quickly and thoroughly enjoyed it and was even a little peeved that I hadn't thought of it myself. (Fancy missing the opportunity of a book with a title like that!) There are a number of similar walks one can do, especially in Britain; I'm thinking of the walk along Hadrian's Wall in particular. Yet the notion of walking the old trench-lined area and no-man's land of Flanders is a terrific one. What an education! Fortunately for the reader, O'Shea has a competent writing hand as well, and I enjoyed the ramble he took me on. O'Shea takes risks which, as far as this reader is concerned, nearly always come off. I was confident enough, reading the prose, to be willing to skip over any minor problems. Certainly there are no gaping wounds and nothing requiring major surgery. It seems to me I have read writing similar to this, which attempts to cut a swathe (and a swagger) through the language, while mistaking a pair of rather blunt pruning shears for a well-sharpened scythe. I congratulate this author on his use of the stone. I can't say that it's much of a book when it comes to the war itself, but O'Shea never pretends it to be otherwise than a view at field level of what's left. If he gets a bit cross at times about some of the former silliness that took place there, who can blame him. I believe this is a first effort by the author and in that case, for my money, it's worth every one of those five available stars. I'd be very proud to have written this.
Rating:
Summary: A Fine Personal Interpretation of History
Review: This is an excellent and very personal interpretation of a time and place told through pacifistic sensibilities. Nugent, in an overwrought blast of ego below, seems offended that the author ever was born let alone have a personal opinion about this war. One can imagine Nugent hysterically waving the flag over the graves of young men whose lives were thrown away by narrow minded, intolerant snobs like himself. And Nugent, don't ever, ever call yourself a historian. That requires an open mind and the ability to comprehend what one reads
Rating:
Summary: Not quite what I expected, but an enjoyable perspective.
Review: This is probably a good book for those very well versed in peace vs war type litarature, both modern and turn of the century. A disdain for all things military seems to run throughout and much reference is made to authors and poets I am not familiar with, which may contribute/detract to/from other's enjoyment of this book. It is as I said, not quite what I expected; a how-to guide dedicated to visiting the modern remnants left behind by the Great War. There are no pictures and fairly crude maps. Though O'Shea does give some very detailed and interesting accounts of his foot travels along the old Western Front, he seems to dwell on so much anti-war erata concerning the travesty and carnage visited upon that generation by their nationalist leadership. With that said, the author's descriptions of the local people and customs encountered along the way, are an unexpectedly interesting sideline for the un-seasoned traveler (such as myself) to that part of the world. As for the local color and the darkly discriptive treatment of the Verdun/Argonne sector, I still seemed to want something more from this book. If one is seeking a historical photo laden then-and-now tome, I would not steer you in the direction of Back to Front. IMHO, much better choices would be; Passchendaele and the Battles of Ypres 1914-18, or The Imperial War Museum Book of The Somme. To O'Shea's credit, he referances from an extensive bibliograghy listed in Further Reading at the end of this book. The Czecko, aka Dave Kacura traphead@hotmail.com
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