Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #315975 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Synopsis
Fifitieth Anniversary Edition With a new introduction by Norman Mailer * 'The best war novel to come out of the United States.' The Times * Norman Mailer's first novel. The book that catapulted him to instant fame. * A modern classic, on every American Literature student's reading list. * Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare.

Customer Reviews

One of the greatest war books of all time.
Not only is this a classic piece of war fiction it delves deeply into the psyche of men under intolerable pressure.The result is not pretty and Mailer makes no apologies for his unforgiving portrayal of the base and primitive side of men at war.It is as fresh today as it was when first written shortly after the end of World War 11 and still is deeply relevant.This is a powerhouse of a novel with stunning charecterisations of men from the weak General Cummings to the more down to earth but nevertheless phiposophical Sergeant Croft.It is a classic novel by any standards.

A multiple-levelled marvel
Although superficially a war novel the predominent themes of this book are escapism and the disappointment of unfulfilled desires. Each chapter ends with a potted biography of each protagonist and the life they have left behind in the US, academic failure, an unfulfilling job or a loveless marriage and effectively juxtaposes these incidents against the grind, boredom and sheer physical trauma of war. In these cases these men have escaped an imagined hell for a real one. Although in the main this book is downbeat it remains rivetting, in particular a 300 page passage covering the platoons mission through the jungle which demands to be read at one sitting and ends with a bizarre piece of Catch 22 style black humour.

A Classic; It's Just That It's Written By An Engineer
I though this a classic novel of World War II, set in the Pacific (U. S. American) theatre. What Mailer does so well is to describe an average group of American Joes, who are not always very likeable, and, taking them through the war, make it all so believable and compelling. The battle descriptions are sometimes horrific, but it is Mailer's willingness to describe the tedium and routine, indeed the pettiness, of war, that is ultimately the book's enduring strength - sometimes war is not heroic or even bloody, but just mundane and squalid.

My only (minor) complaint is that Mailer, who was trained as an engineer at Harvard, tries too hard to make everything connect, when perhaps, in dealing with human affairs, and wartime especially, the point is that life doesn't always connect. Thus I felt at times the book went on too long, a few hundred pages too long, though I want to say it was still a great reading experience, one I recommend to anyone even remotely interested.

And don't stop there! If you like this one, try Gore Vidal's World War II novel, Williwaw, set in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska (a "Williwaw" is a freak storm up there that whips down from the mountains causing freak seas and havoc to shipping - one such storm features in the book.) Williwaw has a cool style and controlled prose that reminds me of Joseph Conrad. Also consider John Horne Burns' WW II novel, The Gallery, set in Naples at the end of the war. This is a lyrical, almost Tennessee Williams' style-novel, about a hick/yob North American soldier coming into contact for the first time with the older, softer culture of the Mediterranean and falling for it, in the form of a decent and beautiful Neapolitan woman down on her luck in collapsed-economy Naples.