Helpful Score: 3
A brilliant imagining of what WWI was like for those who fought it - full of actual people as characters - First of a trilogy (the other titles are Eye in the Door and Ghost Road)
Helpful Score: 2
Excellent read which really made me take an interest in the history of World War I and the real life characters in this fictional account. It is the first novel in the Pat Braker triliogy which continues with The Eye in the Door and Ghost Road.
Helpful Score: 2
I used it for my British Texts and Contexts course in college and it was an interesting book that provided a lot of insight on different situations that took place during WWI.
Helpful Score: 2
In 1917, decorated British officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote a declaration condemning the war. Instead of a court-martial, he was sent to a hospital for other "shell-shocked" officers where he was treated by Dr. William Rivers, noted an thropologist and psychiatrist. Author Barker turns these true occurrences into a compelling and brilliant antiwar novel. Sassoon's complete sanity disturbs Dr. Rivers to such a point that he questions his own role in "curing" his patients only to send them back to the slaughter of the war in France. World War I decimated an entire generation of European men, and the horrifying loss of life and the callousness of the government led to the obliteration of the Victorian ideal. This is an important and impressive novel about war, soldiers, and humanity. It belongs in most fiction collections.
- C. Christopher Pavek, National Economic Research As socs. Lib., Washington, D.C.
- C. Christopher Pavek, National Economic Research As socs. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Helpful Score: 1
Winner of the Booker Prize. A powerful and touching historical novel of the effects of war (WWI) on the individual and of one soldier's objection to the useless suffering and sacrifices caused by blundering commanders, and politicians. That soldier was the well-known poet Siegfried Sassoon who authorities decided to treat as 'shell-shocked' and sent him to a 'asylum rather then the damning publicity to the war which would result from a trial. This is the first book of her trilogy "The Eye in the Door" and "The Ghost Road"
