Product Description

'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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86755 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Publisher
“Brilliant…the great Great War book of our time” Observer

About the Author
Geoff Dyer is the author of WAYS OF TELLING, a critical study of John Berger; the novels THE COLOUR OF MEMORY and THE SEARCH; and BUT BEAUTIFUL: a book about Jazz, which won the 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and was shirtlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llwellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. He writes regularly for the GUARDIAN and OBSERVER, and is contributing editor of ESQUIRE magazine.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
Dyer is not the person to read if you're looking for strong narrative threads. He is the person to read if you want to find out new things, be taken to places you never, ever dreamed existed and be entertained whilst learning a lot. The book, flits around the central idea of what memorials are, particularly in relevance to World War One, why we need them, how we make them and how we interpret them. It moves between academic research and the vague and sometimes comic wanderings of Dyer and his mates as they trudge through the fields of France looking for memorials and the scenes of battle. Dyer's original mind, quirky personality and enthusiasm for his subject make this book rise above the average history of WWI into something at times approaching art. I had a copy of this book years ago and then lent it to someone who never gave it back. It's a testament to his brilliance that I had no hesitation in going out to buy another copy. It's one to keep, to read and re-read.

a brilliant essay on the construction of memory
this is the book to stand out among the crowd: although the subject is not novel - the number of books written about the First World War almost exceeds even Amazon's data-base - the treatment clearly is. anyone interested in how the Great War became one of THE moral touchstones of modernity, in the normalisation of horror or the medialisation of experience should read this book. it's well written, well researched and often moving. it also contains the most honest reason given for writing a book that i have come across in a long time.

Impossibly good
Geoff Dyer is the best living writer in the world. His books pelt you with ideas and swarm your memory with unbearably acute images and phrases. They are all - from his study of John Berger to his recent collected essays - funny and tender and clever. The Missing of the Somme is just as good as the others. In that sense it is nothing special. In every other sense, and in comparison to any other book you are likely to read in the foreseeable future, it shines like a supernova.