On war and writing
(Book)

Includes index.

Samuel Hynes has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes knows war personally. He served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has also written a number of major works of literary criticism, a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. Hynes asserts that war itself...the battlefield uproar of actual combat is unimaginable for those who weren't there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of poets, filmmakers, and painters who give us a sense of these experiences that we can't possibly know. The essays in this book range from the personal. In his working with documentary master Ken Burns and writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, E.E. Cummings and Cecil Day Lewis what we ultimately see is not a military history but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years.