Soldiers Don't Go Mad

January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 10, 2023
Journalist Glass (They Fought Alone) spotlights WWI soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in this intriguing study of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatments. Before they met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, Owen and Sassoon had served on the front lines in France. Owen began exhibiting signs of “shell shock” after a German artillery shell exploded two yards from his head and he spent the next several days in a hole in the ground near the rotting corpse of another officer. Meanwhile, Sassoon, a decorated soldier and published poet, had refused to return to the front after being hospitalized for gastroenteritis; the military determined he was suffering from a nervous breakdown and sent him to Craiglockhart. Glass details treatments prescribed by doctors Arthur Brock and William Halse Rivers, including “ergotherapy” (vigorous mental and physical activity), “talking therapy,” and dream interpretation, and notes that patients were encouraged to confront their “phantoms” through poetry. Success meant returning to the front, however, and Owen was killed in France in 1918. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this is an immersive look at the healing power of art and a forceful indictment of the inhumanity of war. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management.

May 31, 2023
Friendship and collaboration between soldier-poets transformed a WWI psychiatric hospital into a bastion of pacifist activism. Its officer class decimated by shell shock, the British military converted an Edinburgh estate into an elite convalescent facility. At the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, profoundly traumatized men played golf and tennis, worked on a farm, and dreaded their nighttime flashbacks. Among them was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a Royal Welsh Fusilier decorated for his battlefield bravado but sent away for his public opposition to the war. At Craiglockhart he would inspire Wilfred Owen, a wounded young officer who would produce some of the war's most poignant verse. Glass, a veteran war correspondent with a gift for finding powerful stories amidst the rubble, emphasizes the healing powers of writing and fellowship. He gives ample credit to the psychiatrists who encouraged creativity as a way of accessing the traumatized subconscious, even if their goal was ultimately to heal officers (enlisted men were merely court-martialed) so they could return to the fray. Owen was killed in France, a week before the Armistice.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
The devastating trauma of modern warfare and its influence on psychotherapeutic advancements and inspiration for some of the most emotionally charged poetry of the 20th century. Craiglockhart War Hospital, which opened in October 1916 outside of Edinburgh, was among the first hospitals established to treat officers suffering from shell shock (later called PTSD). Rather than return these officers to civilian life, the treatment was intended to prepare them to return to battle and fill in the ranks of massive losses sustained since the beginning of the war. Craiglockhart was notable for the significant role it played in advancing therapeutic treatments of shell shock through psychiatrists such as W.H.R Rivers--and for the impact this facility had on the lives of two emerging poets: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The literary journal The Hydra, produced by the patients and edited by Owen, became "a vehicle...for some of the most profound and heartrending poetry of the war." Within an engrossing novelistic structure, Glass, a former war correspondent and author of They Fought Alone and The Deserters, expertly weaves the stories of these men into a history of Craiglockhart and advancing insights into the causes and treatments for shell shock. Along the way, the author traces how class differences influenced the level of treatment provided. Only ranking officers received sufficient treatment for shell shock, while the soldiers were often forced to go back into battle or risk being executed. Drawing from letters, diary entries, and military and medical documents, Glass probes deeply into the complex lives of Rivers, Sassoon, and Owen, and he capably explores the profound influence that Sassoon and Rivers had on each other's careers and how the burgeoning friendship between Sassoon and Owen impacted their poetry and feelings about the war. "To both poets, the war was damnable," writes Glass. "Sassoon blamed the country's rulers and its complacent citizenry, while in Owen's poetry the war appeared as a natural catastrophe beyond human control." An absorbing, well-researched addition to the expansive canon of World War I literature.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.