p.s. Anybody not in the Freeper Reading Club may still want to read this book and join in on the discussions in January. This book will AMAZE you with it STUNNING level of QUALITY writing. It is definitely the GREATEST American novel ever written.
I have read the first 300 pages of it (only 500 to go) and it has truly lived up to the advance billing PJ-Comix has given it. Easily the most readable book of the Freeper Reading Club so far (not including the first book "Shane"). It's truly an epic and I'm going to be really bummed when it ends, just like I was with other long books like LOTR.
I will include some comments extracted from Peggy Noonan's column from about a year ago about this book:
For America for Christmas this year there's only one gift, a history book. And we should all get busy writing it.Today is the 60th anniversary of "the day that will live in infamy," the sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. We know a lot about what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, but not enough. Some of the best of what we know came from a work of fiction, James Jones's great classic novel, "From Here to Eternity." Jones had been there that day, a young enlisted man at Hawaii's Scofield barracks, a nascent novelist looking for experience. He got it. He wrote the great novel of World War II. It is amazing to realize that unlike the great novels of World War I, "From Here to Eternity" hinges on the day the war began, at least for America, and never touches upon the war's execution or ending--and it was published near the end of the era in which novels really, truly mattered, when they were seen not as a tributary off the great river of American literature but the river itself.
It was a great book with wide cultural impact. People knew the names of its characters; I can still remember my father watching TV once about 20 years ago as someone played taps on a bugle, and my father said, "Play it, Prewitt." A reference to Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the brokenhearted Southern boxer who wouldn't fight but who could make a bugle sing. The great novel was made into a great movie directed by Fred Zinnemann. Like the novel of course but unlike the recently released movie "Pearl Harbor," it actually had a story, a wonderful story of a lonely wife in a bad marriage and a tough man in a cold barracks, not to mention Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Prewitt's best friend, a tough little Brooklyn boy who had issues with authority.
Sixty years later we are at war again, and I happen to think the estate of James Jones should flood the market with a new paperback version of "From Here to Eternity." It would become a great bestseller again, would speak to our times and would give America a sense once again of what it is to be a soldier in the army of our country. Modern novelists don't know about those things.