by Vera Brittain
I have a few pet peeves when it comes to history, but my biggest by far is the question of why the world did not stop Adolf Hitler before he plunged Europe into war. I find it a frustrating question on a number of levels. At its most basic, it's an abuse of hindsight, expecting people in the 1930s t...
I read "Testament of Youth" earlier this sumer in anticipation of the movie. I loved, loved, loved this book. It was my very first introduction to Brittain, having never even heard of her before, let alone being familiar with her work, but it won't be the last. I'm looking forward to exploring some ...
Testament of Youth was a best seller when it was first published in 1933, and became a bestseller once again in the 1970s. It is every bit as good as I'd remembered when I read it first about twenty years ago. Vera Brittain's lively intelligence, determination, bravery and passion all shine through....
This is an eyeopening book. An autobiography of a woman born just prior to the turn of the 20th C, describing her experiences through WW1 until 1925. It is, as might be expected, massive in scope, describing how the war changed things on both a large and small scale. Individually, she lost the boys/...
Re-read, from Mar 2009. Maybe it was because I had a deadline - it being this month's book club book, but I got really quite annoyed with this book. The most obvious element that annoyed me was the sensation that Vera seemed to think that the world owed her something because of her experiences durin...
I found this book alternately grueling and tedious, but hugely compelling in spite of that. It's a first-hand description of WWI by a young, sheltered, brilliant woman who goes into nursing and is savagely broken upon the rack of war. After the war, she becomes more fiercely feminist than before, an...
A memoir of World War I. Vera Brittain does a superb job of reconstructing her experiences from the perspective of a decade and a half later, hindsight being aided by rereading her diaries and letters. Mostly, it is focused on her thoughts and feelings, on a personal level. During the time when her ...
This is an important book. It is about the effects on one woman, Vera Brittain, of the carnage, misery, heartbreak and loss of the "Great War."She loses so much that is not recoverable and still manages to survive although the world is completely changed. Start this one when you have time to plow st...
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