- Hardcover: 153 pages
- Publisher: Faber (1966)
- ASIN: B0000CN86O
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,084,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Alamein to Zem Zem
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Product Description
Product Description
A classic war book by one of the finest poets of the Second World War. Keith Douglas was posted to Palestine in 1941 with a cavalry regiment. When fighting broke out at El Alamein in 1942, he was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he wanted to fight, and so, completely disobeying orders, he drove a truck to the sight of the battle and participated as a tank commander. Alamein to Zem Zem is a vivid and unforgettable description of his experiences on the desert battlefield, seen through the eyes of a poet-soldier.
'Highly charged, violent descriptive prose ... conveys the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses ... Comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918.' Spectator
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.About the Author
Keith Douglas was born in 1920. At school and at Oxford he was both a prolific poet and a committed member of the Officers Training Corps. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted immediately, and was posted to Palestine in 1941. When his tank regiment began fighting in El Alamein in 1942, Douglas was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he made his own way to the battlefield, an experience which he recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to Zem Zem (first published in 1946). He later took part in the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944, and was killed three days later. His Collected Poems came out in 1951.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This first-hand account of the battle of El Alamein by a tank commander who was also a well-regarded poet is well worth reading. While it is rather more gung-ho, the closest parallel I can think of is some of Wilfred Owen's poetry from the Western Front of the previous round of Unpleasantness. I was particularly struck by something that is very common in real military memoirs but almost entirely absent from fictional ones: that soldiers - even officers - rarely know what's going on, are frequently confused, spend far more time waiting around than they do fighting, and that their biggest enemy is often the environment as opposed to the other side's soldiers. Some of the confusion seeps through to the pages. In a very short book, it is sometimes hard to keep track of who is who in Douglas's squadron, but whereas in a work of fiction that would be terribly important, in this true account it really doesn't matter - the overall impression is what counts. In short, this is one of the few books that I can whole-heartedly recommend to absolutely everyone, no matter whether your normal diet is great literature or formulaic pot-boiler thrillers. Buy it. Now.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is really good. It has great descriptions of the North African battle environment, and it does a great job in describing the life of an infantry soldier in battle. Other than just the informative descriptions, that make a great book on their own, the author's thoughts and impressions of the battle routine, other soldiers, commanders and the war mentality in general reflects well in the book. The book has it's own unique sort of philosophy on the war, and the author did a great job in putting it into words. The fact that the book was written by an English infantry soldier while he fought in the battle of El-Alamein in WWII, and later died in Normandy, makes the words stand out even more. I enjoyed the book very much.
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