The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations

by Paul Fussell

Book Overview

Enhanced by the author's rich ironic wit, the topics range from the virtues expoused in The Boy Scout Handbook to a fantasy of the ideal European town in which to recuperate, from a wry analysis of class distinction in America to a moving piece entitled 'My War' in which Fussell depicts his own harrowing experiences of combat in France.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195035798
• ISBN13: 9780195035797
• Release Date: May 1985
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

I cherish Fussell's bitter misanthropy

Fussell started out as that most useless and boring thing---an English-department writer---and eventually became an eloquent chronicler of World War 2. (What took him so long? Does he actually expect me to bore myself unto death with stuff about poetic meter and poetic form?) HANDBOOK contains his first forays into WW2-writing. And he saved the best for last. It's a confession called MY WAR and it is a masterpiece of hatred & bitterness: "My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just. The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic: it sorted so ill with modern popular assumptions about the idea of progress and attendant improvements in public health, social welfare, and social justice. To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice."