Assuming anyone here can actually read 
I’m almost finished with Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger and it really is a great memoir. It’s almost darkly hilarious how frank the book is about everything from the violent to the mundane. The prose used to describe daily idle work and conversations with French civilians is little different than the descriptions of battles and mangled corpses. It’s a whole novel of “oh yeah and this happened”.
Another aspect that fascinated me was the author’s own views on the war. He fought for four years in the losing army of one of history’s most infamous wars, yet he never seemed to regret it. Never wished he was at home. Never lost his Prussian class and reserve. You could wonder if it’s biased since the author might have left out anything that would make him look bad, but even so it’s notable that the book is too neutral to have that “war is heck” message you see in almost every other instance of WWI material. When stereotypical military aristocrat characters show up in media, they almost always lose that demeanor or die to show how brutal and gritty things really are. But here was a real person who went through all that and still came out with the mindset of an Imperial German patriot. Patriotism is the first thing to go in most war stories, so I was intrigued to see a depiction of someone who suffered same as everyone else but never actually lost it. I suppose there’s no real universal standard on how different people will be effected by warfare.
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i've had storm of steel on my read list for literally years and have never read it. you describing it as "its not a regular war is bad omg i regret it all" makes me wanna finally do it, but who knows if i will. i really enjoy war memoirs written from the other side.
ANYWAY
i've been reading ty cobb: a terrible beauty by charles leerhsen
the overarching point of the book has been "all those bad things you heard about ty cobb? most of them never actually happened or were greatly exaggerated because the guy who wrote them all in a ty cobb biography was a grifting chump. cobb didn't even want the book released but then he died so it got released anyway.".
which turn out isn't as much of a let down as i assumed it would be, cause the AURA OF COBB is big for me. he's still got it. he's still an angry bastard who will do literally anything to get on base or score a run. he just (probably) didn't kill some random fools who tried to rob him and wasn't exactly the EXTREME RACIST he's been portrayed as, though he DID beat the shit out of a crippled fan who had no hands mid game, cause the fan said something like "you southern dandy! yer basically a BIPOC!". when people in the crowed yelled the guy had no hands cobb allegedly said "I DON'T CARE IF HE'S GOT NO FEET"! cobb then got kicked out of baseball...until the rest of the team said "if he doesn't come back we won't play" and he was reinstated.
long post no one will ever read. i don't care. i frickin' love ty cobb. best baseball player of all time.
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