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Summary: This book was a great novel about World War one.
Review: I enjoyed reading this book because it was an excellent novel about one soldiers struggle in world war one. I thought the best parts in this book were the many battles and the great detail that was used to describe the battles. If you like this book, another book that I would reccomend is "And no Birds Sang," by Farley Mowat. (Review written by Tony Young, a student in Mr. Newton's English class.)
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Summary: Good fiction, but the philosophy...?
Review: Is this book worth reading? Quite simply, YES. It's not toolong, and you can finish it in three days or less because the type isreasonably large. However, there are some points which I wish to point out. This book is indeed the tale of a soldier, an individual soldier, told from the dank, gloomy trenches of World War I. However, I do not see where this is different from any soldier book - military fiction novels, as I have found are often centered around the individual soldier. Aside from all that, it somewhat downplays the theme of 'the individual' because of how blatantly and often Remarque talks of the bloody, gorey death that creates a realization which stirrs even the most unwavering, desensitized human spirit. He uses the simple pictures of torn limbs and decapitation without stressing enough how much each of THEM, each of the new recruits and each of the old soldiers, has a home and a future and the same internal conflicts as Paul Baumer. In this respect, I believe perhaps he covered too many battles in which baumer participated; I think it would have been sufficient to make account of only two or three, and to enunciate the inhuman horrors which were presented before the soldiers in each. Or is that the very point of the book? To caually and blatantly speak of horrific deaths and shattered dreams, to show the futility of war through the destruction of men, simply by virtue of their participation, if not their death...
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Summary: The ultimate anti-war novel shows the true colors of battle
Review: For those of us who have not lived through a serious war, and even for those of us that have, All Quiet on the Western Front brings to light the true horror of modern warfare. Although the book is over fifty years old (it takes place during World War I), the pain and suffering suffered by the soldiers then and those of today is no less. One cannot help feeling and thinking like Paul Baumer, the main character who gradually realizes the sheer insanity of war- a chess game for the leaders of nations, pitting man against man, men who have no quarrel between each other. A generation is destroyed for nothing, and the world scarred for the whims of a few petty men. The message seems to be one of independent thinking versus fanatic nationalism, of love and cooperation rather than blind hate. Why should the common man fight for some cause that is the fancy of a "higher up"? He should not, for what has the "enemy" done to him? As the war drags on, Paul realizes more and more that the enemy is just like him, perhaps in another time and place his brother or neighbor. This novel is the opposite of all war-glofiying stories, showing the despair and futility of war, and hopefully changing the minds of men bent on conquest and boys headed to a likely early death
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Summary: A great book
Review: All quiet on the western front is a book about war, but also about friendchip. It tells the story about a few soldiers fighting in the trenches of france to win a war that they don't know why they fight. It describes the bad sides of the war as well as the good things that comes out of it.
This book is one of the greatest books I've read and I think that all people schould read this book cause it's a very good description of life during the first world war.
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Summary: Superb! Fascinating! Horrible!
Review: A fabulous book about the German youth during WW1.
As aGerman i read for the first time and was really exhausted.
I know(because of my grandpa) that it was horrible at the front, but so hard... i never expected!
this is a book, everyone should read!
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Summary: worth your while
Review: read it
it is an easy read
it is an eye opener
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Summary: Trenches and circles of hell.
Review: I recently found my [very] old high school copy of this book, and I remembered writing a very appreciative report about it for my eleventh grade English class. Not having anything else convenient to read along my subway ride to work, I started reading it again, after 31 years. And now I remember why my eleventh grade report was so glowing.Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT grabs you by the throat and stomach and doesn't let go, as you are drawn into the blood- and mud-soaked trenches of World War One. Young Paul Baumer, the protagonist, is at first proud and fearless, as he prepares to make a man of himself in the German army. This bravado doesn't last too long. Each battle grows more and more fierce, until this book becomes an unrelenting apocalypse of graves yielding up their dead in mortar attacks. As Paul moves through the trenches, they are nothing less than Dante's circles of the Inferno. It doesn't take Paul too long to discover that wars are fought not for ideals but for old men hungry for power, and will let the young men of their nations die for that hunger. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT has earned its reputation not just as a great war novel but as a great critique of humanity's follies and cruelties. This is a powerful book.
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Summary: A Perspective other than the US
Review: This book is incredible. It is so refreshing to read from the "loser's" point of view instead of the US's all the time. I get so tired of only hearing our side. But it was nice to have my firm belief that other nationalities are people with valid beliefs and opinions be backed up.
I could write literally pages on the brilliance of this book, but I will refrain.
It is a nice, simple read, though a very intense and meaningful one. To clarify, it goes fast, the words are 'easy' but there's so much BEHIND the words.
As Sigmund Freud states, "(War) strips us of the later accretions of civilization and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It compels us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or desired; it tells us to disregard the death of those we love." Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front shows the disillusionment of war-how one can easily lose all past ideals and human emotions, how one can easily forget that his enemy is human, and how one can easily fail to remember that he is still alive.
When the reader compares each character in youth to the `person' they have become, the boys of 1916 are now no more than shadows of what they were or could have been. The only time they experience any happiness is when they are with each other, enjoying the peace of camaraderie. Erich Maria Remarque fiercely details to the reader all that is lost in a war-not only lives and money; but for those who are `lucky' enough to survive-their lives have been forfeit as well. "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces...The first bomb...burst in our hearts. We are cut off from...striving...progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."
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Summary: Jumping Off Place for the "Horrors Of War" Theme
Review: The horrors of war! How many times have we been exposed to it over the past century? Beginning with War and Peace I'd guess the countless books, movies, TV dramatic presentations, mini-series, and all other conceivable forms of mass-communication have been used for the "Horrors of War" drumbeat.Over and over. Over and over. Over and over.<>One only need read this one classic. All Quiet On the Western Front exposes it all--makes unnecessary countless retellings. In this shattering book we have Mr. Common Man, but a boy, his hopes, dreams, ambitions channeled by a stern School Master into the noble cause of "Fighting for the Fatherland." With broad strokes Ramarque paints the horrors of the abyss he is thrown into, and with precision, fine-line sketches he delineates the shattering of his dreams with his return home, on leave, and priceless revisitation of his classroom. The flashbacks of boyhood memories, alone, are priceless, the depictions unforgettable.<>Truly a classic for all time. A copy of All Quiet On The Western Front should be on every bookshelf in America.
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Summary: Haunting and Engaging
Review: I read this book because of the fascination I first encountered when reading about Hemingway and the post-WW1 "Lost Generation." From history classes and other literature I knew that World War 1 was a horrible bloody war, the likes of which were previously unknown. I knew this was the case both on the front and for those suffering behind the lines too. But I was not prepared for such gritty, disturbing tales of the front as they are told first-hand by the narrator of this novel.
I am not going to summarize the plot in this review. Instead I will concentrate on why this book continues to be important, regardless that nearly a century has past since it was written. War nowadays is just as atrocious and horrible as it ever was. It some ways it has gotten better, and in others worse. Sure today's weaponry is more surgical and precise, but the bombs are also way bigger. We who sit behind the lines really have no idea what is is like to be that person who experiences battle first hand, to breath bullets and piss explosions. If anything, all we civilians know is a body count, which is basically to say how our own side is doing. Sadly, barely anybody cares about the other guys.
This book is written from the German perspective, but it is not about a struggle to belonging to any one group or nation. It is a universal tale of inhuman man-to-man carnage, and what that does to the soul of those involved in such a hopeless mess. It is sickening. At times I literally felt queasy from the atrocities described in gruesome detail. Soldiers on all sides could not help but be destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually by this war of wars, this war to end all wars, although it could be any war. Perhaps most disheartening is that the soldiers didn't even know what they are fighting for; they only understand the basic tenet that they must kill or be killed. As a result these men who fought are estranged from life, deflated and ruined. There are no heroes in this sad story; everyone looses.
With America currently involved in a war based on specious-at-best intelligence and half of the American population actually supporting such an endeavor, this book is at least as applicable now as it has ever been. Every war supporter, especially those who have never fought in a war themselves, should read this to understand what they are supporting on the micro-level. If after reading it anybody can continue to support war - except as an absolute last resort - then I will be very surprised.
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