All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel
A trade paperback of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, most often the edition with the plain cover that lets the title do the work. The book follows a class of German schoolboys from nationalist enthusiasm through the daily arithmetic of trench warfare: food, lice, bombardment, and the gradual realization that the men on the other side are equally confused. Remarque wrote it in exile, and the prose keeps its anger just below the surface. The paper is usually thin, the margins are narrow, and the binding is the utilitarian kind that survives repeated classroom assignment. Ideal reader: the reader who suspects that war novels are less about heroism than about the bureaucracy of staying alive, or the student who has been assigned it and discovers it is better than the assignment.
