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From: Gen. Haig Category: Art Date: 01 July 2008 Time: 11:32 AM Review: A big book one often sees on shelves. Somewhere in ones imagination it had become linked to a sentimental fustiness, perhaps vera lynn, or the author's name sounds like dreary britain, anyway had avoided. It is in fact about the life of a quite radical feminist-pacifist (mother of shirley williams) and death of all her friends, sensitive public school boys with a will to do their duty and write poetry about it. The tone is stiff upper lip and descriptions of flowers and stong feelings nobly denied or selflessly pursued. The voice is one ones heard before. But there is something compelling and fresh and terrible about the massacrous murder of pointlessness which was the first world war and its toll on her social group. A kind of rage of death, which didn't end to all got really nasty with the second war, as though once the killing started it couldn't end and it didn't matter that nothing was won by war. The first world war though is where the Holocaust began, and Lynn allows one to feel some inkling of that folly and meaningless death death death. If the Holocaust of the European Jews had not happened, and the the second war had been just the usual power conflicts with populations killed to keep score, how would we view it, which afterall was not fought to save the Jew, gyspies, or homos, would their be still a still be a sense that more efficient brilliant techno massacres should take place to decide borders separating people much the same. Or will we fight again, the chance to die, and kill, and destroy- irrestible.