I’ve honestly never had the slightest interest in World War I, and yet somehow I managed to read two books about it in a row. Maisie Dobbs is a servant who spends her evenings sneaking into her master’s library to read. When she’s discovered, the lady of the house decides that Maisie’s intelligence is worth nurturing, and so she sponsors her education. Everything’s going along swimmingly for Maisie, until World War I starts and she decides to leave university to become a nurse. She goes to […]
These First Few Desperate Hours
It’s 1918, and the mill town of Commonwealth has shut itself off from the world as Spanish flu spreads. Armed men guard the town day and night to keep outsiders who may be contagious away. When two soldiers from a nearby base try to come in, all hell breaks loose. The main character is a teenage boy named Phillip, son of the town founder, and unable to enlist because of a leg injury. Phillip is on guard duty with his friend Graham when the first soldier arrives, […]
“That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”
On a desolate island miles from civilization, a man finds himself faced with an impossible choice. The man is Tom, a stoic, principled veteran, recently returned to Australia after serving in World War I. He’s damaged goods, carrying a heavy load of guilt for being one of the few to actually make it home from the war, alive and physically unscathed. He finds a job that speaks to his solitary tendencies as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, an isolated island about half a day’s […]
Even the Best Laid Plans Can Lead to Failure
Following my reading of Above the Dreamless Dead I decided that I wanted to read more about World War I. I studied the war relatively well in my undergraduate career, but my focus had always been about the long and short term causes and effects, the more social history view. I knew very little about the battles of the war outside the concept of trench warfare, generally speaking. A good place to start seemed Barbara Tuchman’s 1963 Pulitzer prize winning The Guns of August which […]