Book Review for All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Wesley Wheen (Translator)

 

All Quiet on the Western Front/The Road Back #1

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Wesley Wheen (Translator)

First published January 1, 1928

Taken from Goodreads:  One by one the boys begin to fall…

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

 

My Thoughts:  All Quiet on the Western Front is a war story.   While reading I felt like I was alongside the boys fighting the war.  There is graphic details that brought to life the horrors that the soldiers saw and lived through. 

 

The story is a real look at life as a soldier.  Everything from the front line fighting, the friendships that were developed, the injuries received, and the visits home were shared with first hand knowledge.   There is so much more to this book.  I had tears in my eyes during many scenes, smiles for the friendships and laughs, and fear for all that the soldiers were experiencing.  

 

All Quiet on the Western Front is an amazing book.  A story that is almost 100 years old but unchanging as it is the true story of a German Soldier.

 

Thank you Penguin Classics for a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) wrote his most famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on his experience as a soldier in the German army in World War I; it became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1929. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they burned his books and, in 1938, revoked his citizenship. Remarque had already resettled in Switzerland; in 1939 he left Europe for the United States, never to return to the country of his birth. All Quiet on the Western Front has been translated into more than fifty languages and adapted into three acclaimed movies. It is the most widely read novel of World War I.

Maria Tatar (translator) is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore & Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Emerita, and a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. She is the author, editor, and translator of many acclaimed books, among them The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Lustmord: Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany, and, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the NAACP Image Award–winning Annotated African American Folktales. She served as Harvard’s first Dean for the Humanities and is a frequent contributor to the BBC, NPR, and other media outlets. Born in Pressath, Germany, and raised in Illinois, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Samantha Power (foreword) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide and the New York Times bestselling memoir The Education of an Idealist. A former war correspondent, she served as the US ambassador to the United Nations, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and a member of President Obama’s cabinet, and is a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.

 

PRAISE FOR ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT:
“[A] gripping new translation . . . Human fallibility almost guarantees that All Quiet on the Western Front will be read generations from now. But with more conflict occurring now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, with global tensions among the superpowers rising, and with entire media ecosystems armed for informational warfare and demonization, we can be grateful that this new translation will help shape the moral architecture of future generations—driving home the urgent necessity of seeing our common humanity despite all that stands in the way.” —Samantha Power, from the Foreword