Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War | 
| Author: Michele Barrett
Publisher: Verso
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 609299
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1844672301
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN: 9781844672301
ASIN: 1844672301
Publication Date: April 7, 2008
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Product Description
Unique investigation of the impact of the Great War on the lives of the soldiers who survived.
Casualty Figures is not about the millions who died in the First World War; it is about the countless thousands of men who lived as long-term casualties—not of shrapnel and gas, but of the bleak trauma of the slaughter they escaped. In this powerful new book, Michele Barrett uncovers the lives of five ordinary soldiers who endured the "war to end all wars," and how they dealt with its horrors, both at the front and after the war's end. Through their stories, Barrett sheds new light on the nature of the psychological damage of war, which for the first time became both widely acknowledged and profoundly misunderstood through the term "shell shock." Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, Casualty Figures is a moving and original account of the psychological havoc caused by war.
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| Customer Reviews:
Interesting Premise, Poor Execution April 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was really excited to hear that someone was writing a book on shell-shock casualties on the First World War. After studying the same topic for several years, I was eager to see what conclusions Michele Barrett had reached on the condition and its historical importance.
While Barrett's research seems to be thorough and the quotes used do a very good job of bringing her subjects to life, she never does more than report the facts that she has found. Nor does she delve any deeper into the experiences of these men beyond their own eye-witness reports. It would have been very nice to see, perhaps other first-hand accounts from other members of the regiment, or official histories of the battles that Barrett mentions as part of her subject's experiences. There is no way to put what happened to these men into context without this information--was their impression of events colored by their shell-shock? How did other men around them perceive the events? What was the general situation in which they were living? None of these questions are addressed in the book, nor is there ever a sense to put these five men in a wider historic context. They remain individuals, removed from the world in which they lived and still two-dimensional, despite the research that Barrett obviously conducted in order to tell their story. The book is very good and is a very good first step in relating the actual experiences of shell-shock during and after the Great War. However exciting the premise of the book may be, it leaves the reader wanting.
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