This week's Weekly Geeks has two questions. One for Memorial Day, and one for summer reading. Due to the diametric opposites of the topics, I've decided to split this up into two posts. First one's on war....
With Memorial Day in the U.S. this coming Monday, I thought it would be appropriate to focus on the military. Either share your favorite book on war or movie on war and why. Provide a clip from the movie if you'd like or a passage from the book that shows us why you it's your favorite book or movie. Or do both. OR choose your own military theme, for example, if you have a relative or friend in the military and you would like to send them a video or a message of thanks, do that on your blog. OR do all three. The book and movie also don't have to be "patriotic" necessarily. For example, one of my favorite fictional books on war is Johnny, Get Your Gun by Dalton Trumbo.
This is going to be on books - I'm not a big movies buff. However, this book made a great movie as well, apparently (haven't seen it). Cutting to the chase, it's Schindler's List/Ark. The book won the Booker Prize in 1982, despite being a non-fictional masterpiece, and it follows the quest of one man to save the life of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers during World War II: Oskar Schindler. It's an incredibly absorbing book, which its author, Thomas Keneally, has tried to make as factual as possible, so as not to 'debase' the record of Schindler - fiction, according to the author, would do exactly that.
I unfortunately don't have the book at hand, so I can't pull out a passage, but, I would recommend that book to anyone interested in that era. It's well-written, non-fictional, and fills us with hope, that even during the grossest of times, there was one man out there striving to make a difference.
There are some other books that come to mind, including Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which portrays an alternate reality, where Lindbergh won the Presidential elections in 1940, instead of Roosevelt. That was creepy: imagine a Fascist America!
There are loads more, but, I think these are probably the two books I was completely blown away by.
Happy Memorial Day, folks (albeit we don't celebrate it this side of the pond).