It’s been over a century since Remarque’s Paul Bäumer went through the meatgrinder of the senseless brutal war, and not a single fragging thing has changed except for better weapons. It’s still the perceived offense of one country over whatever seems so important to those idiots in charge - the ones who are safe and whose families are safe no matter what happens, and who will benefit from the senseless slaughter - that sends a bunch of regular people to slaughter other regular people, the violen...

All Quiet on the Western Front is a book about a 20-year-old German boy named Paul. He is serving in World War I – this is hand-to-hand combat, trench warfare, barbed wire, bayonets, and gas.All Quiet on the Western Front is about the devastation of war, and that no one survives even if the soldier returns from war. Personally, this book is okay. It is very character driven (not plot driven), and I don’t usually enjoy character driven books. The narrator is a bit detached, but maybe that is supp...

Październik 2022:Udało mi się. Po trzech podejściach skończyłam. Przesłuchałam audiobooka w wykonaniu Krzysztofa Gosztyły i nie mogłabym wyobrazić sobie lepszego lektora. Praktycznie do końca myślałam, że obniżę ocenę, bo jednak nie mogłam przejść przez jej początek, ale ostatnie zdanie, które tak naprawdę tłumaczy sens tytułu doprowadziło mnie do płaczu. Zostawiam 5 gwiazdek i mocno polecam. Początek 2022:40% DNF Miałam do niej już podejście w 2021, ale po roku muszę ją ponownie odłożyć. To nie...

Futile!

I was just beginning to reach the age when you become critical of the world around you, when I first read this book.

You know, a teenager on her high-horse.

But re-reading this book still makes me feel the same. The futility of war. The utter waste of life. What a shame.

Why can’t the generals go down into the trenches? Let them fight it out!

Would not be a lot of wars.

Five stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

"It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning."This slim novel about the horror of the World War I trenches and the senselessness of war was published in 1929. If you open this book up today, it is absolutely just as relevant now as it was decades ago. It is powerful and breathtaking. I finished my second reading of this last month and barely a day goes by without me thinking about it. I had read “All Quiet” fo...

They were young. They were twenty-year-old. The war has stolen their youth.To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapable into itself.From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs dee...

There are already thousands of reviews for this deeply moving and heartbreaking book here on Goodreads, and I don't know that I could add anything new. It simply broke my heart. However I do feel really strongly that I should describe the vivid imagery that I'm left with. Bright red poppies in bloodied fields Where death stalked its victims. It cared not for age, creed, or nationality What would they have achieved in life, These young men, with so much yet to experience, So many dreams to fulfi...

Man, I need a break. I've been reading about the First World War solidly since December and I've had enough now. There's only so many times you can go through the same shit, whether they're English, French, German, Russian – oh look, another group of pals from school, eagerly jogging down to the war office to sign up. Brilliant. Now it's just a matter of guessing which horrible death will be assigned to them: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbin...

The greatest war novel?Maybe.This was one of the first books that made me think that even though I wanted to be a writer someday, maybe I did not have what it takes. This was a sharp, swift kick in the gut; a none too subtle reminder that there are somber, very real and poignant moments captured in literature that escape petty categorization and cynicism, there are real moments that cannot be trivialized and placed on a genre specific bookshelf. Powerful.** 2018 - This book, as a war novel, is c...

I don't know why it took me so long to get to "All Quiet on the Western Front," but I'm glad I finally read it and am grateful to my friend Rose for recommending it. The book, first published in the late 1920s, is an absolutely heartbreaking, wonderfully written novel about the permanent damage done to those who fight in wars. Few anti-war novels written since have matched Erich Maria Remarque's unsettling book, and I doubt any have surpassed it.Given how famous "All Quiet" is, there's little ne...