The Road Back

Rating:
Summary: An Exceptional Book
Review: A wonderful mix of poetic and politics, idealism and romanticism, beautiful scenery and horrible flashbacks. You are never completely sure what is going to happen and you are not allowed to be led by any single event in the novel except life itself. Remarque hits on our own senses and emotions and gives us a rare opportunity to follow the affairs and thoughts of another being. Amazing

Rating:
Summary: What a Gem!
Review: A wonderful mix of poetic and politics, idealism and romanticism, beautiful scenery and horrible flashbacks. You are never completely sure what is going to happen and you are not allowed to be led by any single event in the novel except life itself. Remarque hits on our own senses and emotions and gives us a rare opportunity to follow the affairs and thoughts of another being. Amazing

Rating:
Summary: One Soldiers Dream...
Review: The Road Back, sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, is a incredibly touching story of comrades returning from years at war to a society that neither wants to accept nor help them in their search for a meaningful life after war. This lost generation goes through life seeing no more purpose in living.

Remarque's incredible descriptive style leads the reader through turmoil in Germany, from food shortages, to political unrest, suicide, and murder, and yet at the same time he makes pauses to simply show some of the beauty left in the world. The characters are incredible and after putting down the book I felt that I had bonded with people I had only known for a couple of hundred pages and yet had been through so much with. Follow the comrades through tough times and their realizations about their own meanings of life.

Rating:
Summary: Remarque nailed it early on...
Review: There seems to be a plethora of both novels and non-fiction books now about the ravages of war and its aftermath, describing both the physical and emotional scars, now that the world has gone through World War II, Vietnam, and scores of other wars. However, when Remarque was writing, there was very little literature of this sort. He nailed it early on, when the Allies were still celebrating their triumphs after the War to End All Wars, and no one outside Germany really cared what happened there. In the West, even today, we have been conditioned to think of Germany during the World Wars as an army of emotionless automatons who blindly followed orders and suffered no moral apprehension. This novel, and others by Remarque, show this to be untrue. The Germans died, cried, loved, lost, and suffered, both physically and emotionally, as much as any soldier of any army. This is the fitting sequel to "All Quiet on the Western Front" (Paul Baumer even gets a passing mention as the protagonists remember lost comrades), and while it lacks the grit and guts of Remarque's wartime novel, it shows the sense of loss, grief, and hopelessness felt by many on both sides after the Great War, and other wars as well.

Rating:
Summary: An Exceptional Book
Review: This is an even better book than Remarque's better-known "All Quiet on the Western Front." The character development is excellent, and many of the scenes are extraordinarily powerful.

Rating:
Summary: This could be a book about P.T.S.D.
Review: This is an excellent story about a group of young men who try to to put some semblance of normality back into their lives after experiencing the horrors of war. One cannot help feeling sympathetic for these men. Perhaps they were the enemy, perhaps they were on the "other side". But for the most part they were ordinary young men, generally decent and not so different from men in the U.S., Britain or Canada. They went to war with the same ideals of patriotism and duty as allied soldiers, and came back scarred physically and emotionally. As well as feeling disillusioned to find that their sacrifices had been for nothing, the people at home seem to be almost indifferent and have no understanding of what they went through. What they experienced then, seems to be very similar to what soldiers of today are experiencing. Post traumatic stress disorder.