Posts Tagged ‘world war ii’

What was this book about?

I was told it was about the bombing of Dresden, but most of the story was about a guy called Billy Pilgrim who could travel through time and spent some of his life living in a zoo on an alien planet.

You would think that you would get some sense from the linear story telling. However, when you can travel backwards and forwards through time, that quickly becomes irrelevant. It’s enough to drive a man to suicide. So it goes.

Anyone who does not want to fly combat missions is sane enough to fly combat missions. That is the ironic narrative of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel set during the Second World War.

I found it really slow going at first. Funny, but slow moving. It follows the life of Yossarian, as well as a large cast of other characters, as they attempt to survive through the war. As the story goes on it opens up into a dark, satirical and ultimately very funny story. If you have that kind of sense of humour. Which I do.

The impossible but simultaneously inevitable situations that Milo Minderbinder finds himself in, the idea of someone being promoted just so their name would be Major Major and Captain Black’s endless series of loyalty oaths are just absurd enough to be ridiculous and yet somehow plausible in the crazy world we live in.

How can you pretend that someone as massive as the Holocaust never happened? That is the topic of Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s book. They look at many of the most widely recognised Holocaust deniers and what exactly it is that they believe.

The book spends a good deal of the book refuting the claims of Holocaust deniers. This was a little disappointing for two reasons. Firstly, it was just horrible to read. Transcripts of former German soldiers explaining how it was done made for extremely unpleasant reading. Secondly, I wanted to read this book because I wanted to know more about the psychology of Holocaust deniers, and I felt there could have been more on this.

The conclusion of the book looks at how we can learn from such obviously nonsense claims as Holocaust denial in terms of determining whether other people, looking at other issues, are promoting genuine revision or simple denial.

On getting back to Ingleton after the waterfall trail on Saturday we found ourselves in the middle of a 1940’s wartime recreation with everyone walking round in army uniforms or civilian period costumes.

Apparently the whole town gets involved – we wandered into a pub with lots of British flags and bunting lining it which I just presumed was a BNP rally but apparently that was part of the “recreation” too.

Myself and Lil debated at some length whether we were dead Silent Hill style or whether we had travelled back in time, or indeed even just accidentally wandered onto a holodeck. Namely because the 1940’s day had clearly been going on for some time and apparently wasn’t finishing that day either (it was all still there when we went past on the Sunday too).