The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.28

  This work was written by someone who was born after the two world wars and who, like everyone of his and subsequent generations, have been brought up on the myth and memory of war. In this examination of the poems, memorials, memoirs, photographs, histories and documentaries of World War I, this book brings together a network of memory that illuminates people's relation to the past. The author brings to it his own experience - his father, who was at the Somme, watching The Blue Max and all the yesterdays on television, making airfix kits, buying poppies every November. By the end the reader understands more about war and memory, tenderness, horror, the comfort of landscape, the morality and immorality of order and disorder.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.42

  'Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future's view of the past. We will remember them.' Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past.