Chronicle Of Youth

by Vera Brittain

Book Overview

Vera Brittain's bestselling "Testament of Youth" was based on her actual diaries-which have far greater intimacy and immediacy than the book extracted from them. Beginning in the carefree summer of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0006364616
• ISBN13: 9780006364610
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Fontana / Collins
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

If only we would learn

I also read this book over twenty years ago. After a couple of house moves, I have no idea what happened to my copy so I decided to buy another one and read it again. My mother-in-law left medical school to serve as a nurse with the American Army in World War I, and I have always felt that, if she had written about it, this might have been her story also. Along with the stories from World War II and all the other experiences of nurses in the other five wars in the past hundred years, this story should be read and remembered. After the stories of the great battles and heroism and cowardice, the nurses are left to pick up the pieces. This book should be on the required list of every high school and college in this country. Maybe if we saw war from the viewpoint of the medical personnel, we wouldn't allow ourselves to get into the kind of thankless situation our country is in now.

Utterly unforgettable

I read this book in 1988 and have never forgotten it. This may be the most moving, heart-wrenching, beautifully-written book I have ever read. It is a diary, from 1913 to 1917. It opens when the author was under 21, on Jan. 1, 1913, progresses thru that year and on into the war. This is a wrenching book, vivid,super-poignant--written with great beauty. I am unable to convey how strongly it affected me and it remains one of the most exceptional things I have ever read.

A Chronicle of Youth

This is the single best book that I have read in my life. I think that everyone should read it; like Vera says in her introduction, the more people who read it and are aware of the horrible waste of life, especially young life, that war is, the less people will allow it to happen. This is a great book for anyone, but especially the young- I am a teenager myself (13), as Vera was (she was 19, but oh well), and it is so much more real- what she thinks and feels and believes are so like ours, even written 85 years ago, and it makes her tradgedy seem so much more real when we see how much she was like us. It is a story of what true love is, also; when we read fiction we think "Oh, that couldn't happen in real life": here it is, it did happen, but they were only allowed a taste of what it could have been like before it was snatched away from them again. It's a reasonably hard book, guys, but it is worth it: you'll never read a better book and it will show you, if you havn't realised already, how horrible such a war is in the deaths of people so young, bright, brave, kind, and brilliant people as Roland, Edward, Victor, and Geoffery.

Completely and utterly absorbing

The actual diaries kept by Vera Brittain, which were the basis for the much better known Testament of Youth. As such they are even more personal and direct in conveying the emotions and experiences of this period during the Great War. One of the only two books I have ever read which when I had finished I went straight back to the beginning and read through all over again. Tony Maynard-Smit