Лучшие книги Пола Фасселла

Специалист по истории культуры и литературы Пол Фассел увлекательно рассказывает о социальных классах в Америке. Хотя большинство американцев ощущают, что изрядная часть их мыслей и поступков подсказана им соображениями статуса, идея класса у них вызывает смущение. В США нет системы унаследованных титулов и рангов, каждому поколению приходится заново определять иерархии. Классовые различия столь расплывчаты и трудноуловимы, что ставится под сомнение само существование классовой структуры. Фассел подробно описывает стиль жизни каждого класса, то, как его представители одеваются, предпочитают проводить досуг, где живут, какое образование…

Книга Пола Фассела - историка, литературоведа и ветерана Второй мировой войны - посвящена Первой мировой как "точке перехода" от старого типа сознания к новому. Практики окопной войны, как повседневные, так и магистические (то есть связанные с воздействием ситуативных магических культурных кодов на сознание), во многом определили те существенные изменения, которые произошли в мировосприятии в ХХ веке, а порожденная войной литература стала "шаблоном" для описания всех последующих войн. В книге рассмотрено творчество самых видных "окопных писателей" - как в общем контексте английской литературы, так и в контексте реалий Великой войны.

The bestselling, comprehensive, and carefully researched guide to the ins-and-outs of the American class system with a detailed look at the defining factors of each group, from customs to fashion to housing.

Based on careful research and told with grace and wit, Paul Fessell shows how everything people within American society do, say, and own reflects their social status. Detailing the lifestyles of each class, from the way they dress and where they live to their education and hobbies, Class is sure to entertain, enlighten, and occasionally enrage readers as they identify their own place in society and see how the other half lives.

The Boys' Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell's unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman's experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author's own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children--for children they were--who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war's brutal essence.

"A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth," Fussell writes in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, The Boys' Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell's profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.

In this highly-praised autobiographical work, the author of "The Great War and Modern Memory" recounts his own experience of combat in WWII and how it became a determining force in his life. "Doing Battle" is at once a summing-up of one man's life and profoundly thoughtful portrait of America's own search for identity in the second half of this century.

In this amusing and trenchant book, Paul Fussell zeroes in on the death of American sensibility and taste. "We are living in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash," he writes in this reference work that exposes bad, from bad advertising and bad ideas to bad restaurants and bad TV.