The Compensations of War - The Diary of an Ambulance Driver during the Great War

Bowerman Guy Emerson

Summary

This remarkable chronicle of one man’s rite of passage through the crucible of WWI offers a vividly detailed account of life on the Western Front.   In 1917, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American army’s ambulance service. Like other young ambulance drivers―Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Cowley―Bowerman longed to “see the show.” For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily diary of the war.   Only twenty when he enlisted, Bowerman was an idealistic young man who exulted that his section was made up mostly of young “Yalies” like himself. But he expected the war to change him, and it did. In the end he writes that he and his compatriots scarcely remember a world at peace.   Bowerman’s unit was attached to a French infantry division stationed near Verdun. Sent to halt the German drive to Paris in 1918, the division participated in the decisive counterattack of July and tracked the routed Germans through Belgium. Then, “unwarned,” Bowerman and his comrades were “plunged into . . . a life of peace.” Into this life, he writes, they walked “bewildered,” like “men fearing ambush.”

Available since: 11/12/2012.

Print length: 201 pages.

Other books that might interest you

Stand Watie: The Life and Legacy...

Charles River Editors

Stand Watie’s life connects the traditional Cherokee homeland in Tennessee and Georgia, the fight within the tribe over leaving for the West or staying on their homeland and trying to resist, and the Trail of Tears. At the same time, his life also includes the ongoing split between mixed-blood and full-blood Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation, and the chaos of Indian Territory during the Civil War.
On the surface, Indian Territory was peaceful and fairly prosperous, but old resentments simmered under the surface. The most dangerous of these was in the Cherokee Nation. Following the Cherokee removal, the leaders of the faction of the tribe that had actually signed the Treaty of New Echota suffered violence. There had been a law that giving away Cherokee land was punishable by death, and several of the leaders who signed the treaty were murdered. Stand Watie was one of the signers, and he barely escaped, but one of his brothers was executed.
The Principal Chief was John Ross. He and his faction managed to retain political control of the Cherokee tribe, but there was lasting enmity between the Watie and Ross factions of the tribe. In a broad sense, the signers of the hated treaty were mixed-blood Cherokee, and the resistance had been led by full-bloods. Stand Watie headed the mixed-blood faction and John Ross the full-blood faction. Ironically, John Ross himself was mixed-blood and Watie was a full-blood, but regardless, this tribal split had important ramifications for the Cherokee in the coming war.
Like the country as a whole, the Cherokee Nation was split over the question of slavery, and with an estimated 100 slaves owned, Watie was the biggest native slaveholder in the region. At the start of the war, Watie was commissioned as a colonel in Confederate service and later as a brigadier general. His 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles Regiment fought more engagements than any other Confederate unit west of the Mississippi River.

Show book

Sultan of Swing - The Life of...

Michael Crick

Sir David Butler pioneered the science of elections, transforming the way we analyse election results. In 1945, aged only twenty, Butler was the first to turn British constituency results into percentages, and thereby founded the science of psephology. Appearing as an expert on Britain's first TV election night in 1950, he promoted the idea of 'swing' to explain gains and losses to the public. Later, he invented the BBC's popular Swingometer, which is still used today. He has publicly analysed every British general election since the Second World War, and done more than anyone to transform TV coverage of elections, with a style that combined authority and showmanship with his phenomenal memory for facts and figures.
First summoned by Churchill for polling advice when he was only twenty-five, David Butler got to know most of Britain's senior post-war politicians and has acted as a highly influential voice behind the scenes. He wrote dozens of books and taught scores of leading figures in politics and the media around the world, building a huge international reputation which regularly took him to America, Australia and India.
Award-winning TV correspondent Michael Crick has known David Butler for forty years. In Sultan of Swing, based on interviews with Butler himself, his friends, family and colleagues, and with access to many previously unseen papers, Crick chronicles the long and energetic life of the greatest analyst of British elections – a story that weaves its way through post-war history with surprises, colour and humour.

Show book

Hollywood’s Favorite Screwball...

Charles River Editors

“If I couldn't laugh, I'd rather die.” – Claudette Colbert 
The 1930s were the height of the classical Hollywood era, known for lavish studio productions by heavyweights like MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox, which were operating at the height of their powers. Every major studio possessed a long roster of contract players, and films were released at such a rapid pace that it made for an especially competitive environment within the industry. Even while America remained in the throes of the Great Depression, the film industry continued to flourish, and movies easily supplanted the theater as the main attraction for American entertainment. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to claim that the film industry reached its zenith during the decade precisely because it offered an affordable (if very temporary) escape from the anxieties of the economic woes of the era. 
When the American Film Institute ranked its top 50 screen legends of the 20th century, many of the people named had careers spanning several decades, but one of them managed the feat despite living less than three decades. Ranked as the 22nd greatest actress of the 20th century, Jean Harlow was on the screen for less than 10 years, but in that time the “Blonde Bombshell” became the most popular actress of the 1930s, eclipsing superstars like Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer along the way. In fact, the platinum blonde accomplished that feat as a leading lady for just five years before her premature death of renal failure at the age of 26. 
Carole Lombard has been memorialized in many fitting ways as an actress, and one of her biggest contributions to Hollywood was the blond archetype that the film industry used successfully for decades in screwball comedies, paving the way for the success of women like Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of that fact is that it was actually based on Carole’s gushing personality.

Show book

Hill of Beans - Coming of Age in...

John Snyder

John Snyder's memoir of growing up the the Depression era south evokes a time gone by. It is written with affection and non-judgmental understanding of people dealing with hard times, sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with violence, including an unsolved case of arson that changed the author's life. In three parts, it is about early childhood among North Carolina mountaineers, living for a time with two eccentric aunts, and growing up on a sharecropper farm before the author went away to the University of Chicago. Hill of Beans has received favorable reviews from Roy Blount, Jr., Diane McWhorter, James Atlas, Jonathan Galassi, Robert Morgan, Janisse Ray, Charles Gaines and other eminent authors. Kirkus's Best of 2012 review compared it to the works of Twain and Turgenev.

Show book

There's Nothing in This Book...

Paula Poundstone

Part memoir, part monologue, with a dash of startling honesty, There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say features biographies of legendary historical figures from which Paula Poundstone can't help digressing to tell her own story. Mining gold from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven, among others, the eccentric and utterly inimitable mind of Paula Poundstone dissects, observes, and comments on the successes and failures of her own life with surprising candor and spot-on comedic timing in this unique laugh-out-loud book. 
If you like Paula Poundstone's ironic and blindingly intelligent humor, you'll love this wryly observant, funny, and touching book.

Show book

Cleopatra - Her History Her Myth

Francine Prose

A feminist reinterpretation of the myths surrounding Cleopatra casts new light on the Egyptian queen and her legacy 
 
The siren passionately in love with Mark Antony, the seductress who allegedly rolled out of a carpet she had herself smuggled in to see Caesar, Cleopatra is a figure shrouded in myth. Beyond the legends immortalized by Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and others, there are no journals or letters written by Cleopatra herself. All we have to tell her story are words written by others. 
 
What has it meant for our understanding of Cleopatra to have had her story told by writers who had a political agenda, authors who distrusted her motives, and historians who believed she was a liar? Francine Prose delves into ancient Greek and Roman literary sources, as well as modern representations of Cleopatra in art, theater, and film. She challenges the common narratives driven by orientalism and misogyny and offers a new interpretation of Cleopatra’s history from the lens of our own era.

Show book