“This is not a book to promote tranquility, and readers in quest of peace of mind should look elsewhere,” writes Paul Fussell in the foreword to this original, sharp, tart, and thoroughly engaging work. The celebrated author focuses his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious third-rate novelists, sexual puritans, and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He moves from the inflammatory title piece on the morality of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima to a hilarious disquisition on the “naturist movement”, to essays on the meaning of the Indy 500 race, on George Orwell, and on the shift in men’s chivalric impulses toward their mothers. Fussell’s “frighteningly acute eye for the manners, mores, and cultural tastes of Americans” (New York Times Book Review) is abundantly evident in this entertaining dissection of the enemies of truth, beauty, and justice.
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"The title essay alone is a must-read. About how our use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while morally problematic, saved vastly more lives and suffering by preventing an Allied invasion of mainland Japan." — Joe (4 out of 5 stars)
"The title essay alone is a must-read. About how our use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while morally problematic, saved vastly more lives and suffering by preventing an Allied invasion of mainland Japan."
" Erudite essays from one who was there... "
Paul Fussell is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books. His Companion to Wartime, The Great War and Modern Memory won the National Book Award in 1976 as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from Phi Beta Kappa. He has taught at Connecticut College, the University of Heidelberg, and Rutgers University. Mr. Fussell lives in Philadelphia.
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