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Epicurus.com - Up Front
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $16.47
Your Save: $ 8.48 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.530207
EAN: 9780393050318
ISBN: 0393050319
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2000-12
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
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Editorial Reviews:
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A reissue of the 1945 classic book of text and drawings with a spectacular new foreword by Stephen E. Ambrose. Up Front is one of the most famous books to emerge from the Second World War and remains an icon of the "greatest generation." In his drawings of the infantry dogfaces Willie and Joe, done while he himself fought in campaigns in Sicily and Italy, Bill Mauldin created the immortal archetypes of the American fighting man. He knew, as one who had been on the front lines and in the trenches, that Willie and Joe--with their unshaven faces, their gallows humor, their fortitude, and their dislike of privilege and cant--exemplify something enduring and noble about Americans at war. Up Front is a vivid piece of living history and a potent reminder of the sacrifices of the men who fought and won our greatest war.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: One of Bill's BEST!!!!
Comment: I had an original post WWII copy of this book and gave it away when I moved from W.Va..... Boy, was that ever a mistake!!!! I needed a copy for an event here honoring the Veterans, and so I was very pleased to see this one in print..... Bill looks at war from the dogface's perspective, and I'm quite sure there's a Bill Mauldin in Iraq somewhere.... but he's tied to the Internet and I'm not sure if we'll get good pen and ink sketches outta him now..... Bill had the way of seeing the ironic, the humerous, and the just plain sorry, in the average G.I.'s battle to survive....... I'd recommend it to school teachers for a look at WWII (AND I'd hustle up some of the last survivors... that first hand look isn't going to be with us much longer).............the Students would actuall LEARN something useful!!!
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Summary: In Memory of Our Fallen and Our Gold Star Mothers
Comment: It's a gift, the ability to draw, to have perspective, to create, to be able to portray human misery as humor, for a reader to see the image and words and turn to laughter. Bill Mauldin had this gift that gained prominence in a time of war where talents rise to their greatest heights or sink to their lowest depths.
Truth is portrayed in humor or the humor isn't funny. Sergeant Bill Mauldin, an infantryman, barely twenty, and serving in Italy picks up a pencil and anything he can draw on, and begins to sketch two characters named Willy and Joe, two, brave, disheveled, irreverent, likeable and crusty infantry soldiers that give meaning to the names infantrymen were referred to as: ground-pounders, dogfaces, legs, and grunts. Mauldin portrays their grim and grimy existence with fatalistic pictures and captions--or grunts. One called "Breakfast in Bed" finds one of them waking up under a cow's utters, or the one where both are in a rain-filled foxhole and Willie touches Joe's shoulder saying, "Joe, yesterday ya saved my life an' I swore I'd pay ya back. Here's my last pair o' dry socks," or with rain pelting down on a scrawny dog facing the opening of their make-shift shelter, one of them says: "Let'im in. I wanna see a critter I kin feel sorry fer." My all-time favorite is a drunk German staggering toward a hidden Willie and Joe, holding a bottle of schnapps, unaware that he is wandering into American lines: "Don't startle `im, Joe. It's almost full."
These cartoons show the comradeship that soldiers developed for each other that would last a lifetime. Each man knew each other better than his own family or spouse ever would, and they could see the good and the bad in everything. They would carry a wounded lieutenant back to safety because he wasn't a "salutin' demon," or curse the Germans as vile, evil Nazis for scuttling a large keg of cognac before their retreat. These soldiers were miserable without being despondent. They were scared without being cowardly. They complained about their predicaments, but carried out their mission as American soldiers always do--attacking silently. The viewer cannot help but feeling empathy and admiration for soldiers who sometimes spent thirty months "in the line."
Mauldin goes further than just making us laugh at the miserable existence of two men trying to stay alive. His real success is that his humor defines the very best and most humane in the human character when it is engaged in its most destructive behavior. It is also timeless. Seventy years later, civilians and servicemen can still see the gallows humor in Willie and Joe's death-defying predicaments.
"Up Front" is Mauldin's account, of what he was doing when he created a particular drawing, why he made sure to include medics, engineers, chaplains, and even Tommies. The writing is matter of fact, well-written, and interesting, but without fascination. That was saved for the cartoons. The author is explaining each one in his text. It's the drawings and the captions that make this book a winner and a conversation piece.
Bill Mauldin died January 22, 2003. Willie and Joe occupying a foxhole filled with water and several cubic feet of complaints, live on.
Think about this the next time you put on a pair of dry socks, and marvel at the simple pleasure of just how good they feel.
May 26, 2008 Memorial Day (observed)
In Memory of the Fallen and all our Gold Star Mothers--especially today.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Marvellous
Comment: I am very satisfied with my purchase.The book itself is a pleasure to look at.The drawings are just as funny as I found them as a kid.The writing itself is new to me,but superb.It will allways be among my favourit books.Again marvellous
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Summary: The Face of War
Comment: Indispensable depiction of the face of the Second World War. War and the pity of war. The humour is in the pity.
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Summary: My Favorite War 'Novel'
Comment: Of course, this is not a novel. It's a collection of cartoons as they appeared in the Armed Services newspaper Stars and Stripes. The cartoon began to appear in 1944 as the invasion of Europe was underway and millions of Allied troops were fighting their way through Italy and France and into the heart of the third reich.
After a few false starts, Mauldin settled on two characters, Willie and Joe-infantry men. Willie and Joe (who were barely distinguishable from each other) were concerned with all the things that veterans said concerned them during the war. Lousy food was as much of a concern as enemy artillery, fear of cold, wet feet as annoying as the fear of death.
The cartoons, and Mauldin's self-effacing recollections together form a kind of narrative that is at once immensely personal and deeply historical. Mauldin was a pioneer. It was ten years before Cornelius Ryan The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Dayturned personal narratives into history and almost forty before Ken Burns came along.The War - A Film By Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Mauldin was, in effect, the only war reporter who was relatively uncensored. Since his cartoons carried no strategic information, his only worry was the military's possible perception that he might be lowering troop morale with his swipes at the brass and the rear-echelon. Fortunately, some American sensibility that 'it's good to laugh at the boss even if the boss is us' prevailed.
Up Front was one of the few books that my parents kept by their bedside. This is the book that helped the post-war generation remember the war as it was fought by the men who did the hard work. A quiet masterpiece.
Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG: A Novel
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