World War I Collection Spotlight - Essentials [Adult]

As the Great War dragged on and its catastrophic death toll mounted, a new artistic movement found its feet in the United Kingdom. The Trench Poets, as they came to be called, were soldier-poets dispatching their verse from the front lines. Known for its rejection of war as a romantic or noble enterprise, and its plainspoken condemnation of the senseless bloodshed of war, Trench Poetry soon became one of the most significant literary moments of its...

The definitive edition of the classic novel of love during wartime, featuring all of the alternate endings: "Fascinating...serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author's process" (The New York Times).
Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the...

Imagine a more controversial Rosie the Riveter-a generation older and more outlandish for her time. She was the "farmerette" of the Woman's Land Army of America (WLA), doing a man's job on the home front during World War I. From 1917 to 1920 the WLA sent more than twenty thousand urban women into rural America to take over farm work after the men went off to war and food shortages threatened the nation. These women, from all social and economic strata,...

"More dramtatic than fiction ... THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained ... The product of painstaking and sophisticated research." CHICAGO TRIBUNE Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its...

Publishers Weekly: This audio edition of Trumbo's classic 1939 novel of war's insanity begins as a bit of a slog because of the lengthy padding at its start. With two introductions, from Cindy Sheehan and Ron Kovic, that attempt to place the novel in the context of more recent armed conflicts in both Iraq and Vietnam, it is the better part of a disc before the book properly begins. Once it does, though, the slog ceases. Trumbo's novel is spine-tingling...

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants—never more so than in 1917 when the nation entered the First World War. Of the 2.5 million soldiers who fought with U.S. armed forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, some half a million—nearly one out of every five men—were immigrants. In The Long Way Home, David Laskin, author of the prizewinning history The Children's Blizzard, tells the stories of twelve...

From the trenches to the home front, the most profound fiction inspired by World War I--and a moving memorial to the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event. The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writing; from Brooke to Sassoon, the poetry generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in prose fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war's individual and communal...

For the millions at home watching the horrors of the First World War unfold, there were few means by which they could express their anxiety, show their pride for the Tommies on the front, or vent their frustration at the way the war was being fought. So, many did what the British do best - they wrote letters and, in so doing, tried to understand the events over which they had no control. And many of these were addressed to the Editor of the Letters...

The horrors of war and the pacifist sentiments expressed in Benjamin Britten's War requiem and the poems of Wilfred Owen are evoked in scenes and vignettes illustrating death and suffering in World War I.