Enjoy For Free One Of Ours Illustrated By Willa Cather Presented In Multimedia Book

have always enjoyed stories about how people lived years ago, and this one certainly didn't disappoint me, giving a great insight into not only the everyday practicalities of living at this time, but also looking closely at the characters themselves, thier hopes, fears and personalities.

I've read many books about The First World War, but never from the perspective of American Servicemen travelling so far to fight a war which must have seemed so remote and distant, especially when you consider it was in an age when crossing the Atlantic wasn't then the easy step it is now.

The second part of this book moves seamlessly to Europe, and brilliantly describes a country torn apart by war.

I thought the author did a fantastic job of portraying the heartbreaking events unfolding in this dreadful conflict, and I was frequently moved by her writing.
One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather that won thePulitzer Prize for the Novel, It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native in the first decades of theth century.


I have read at least three other of the author's works and this one is easily the best.
Told in five parts, we meet Claude when he is in school, see him leave school to run the farm as his father and younger brother go to Colorado to run a new acquisition, see him courting Enid, see his marriage disintegrate, and see his experiences in WWI.


The writing is superb and the story flows linearly, I do get tired of multitime line books, I have recommended this book to others, One has already read and finished it and said it was the best book she has read this year,

I found this information on SuperSummary:

In the army, Claude finally feels he is “one of ours”: a valuable part of a greater struggle.
He meets friends that stimulate and inspire him, such as Victor Morse and David Gerhardt, His realization of purpose, however, is bittersweet, as he slowly comes to realize that he can never return home, If he survives the war, he will never find the same sense of fulfillment there,

Claudes character is partially based on Willa Cathers cousin, Grosvenor “G, P. ” Cather, who lived on an adjoining family farm near Cathers own in Nebraska, Claudes character combines traits from Grosvenors wartime experiences, narrated to Cather in letters, and Cathers own personality,

One 'spoiler': We know the marriage will not succeed almost immediately, Enid pronounces his name 'Clod',

Published in, One of Ours by Willa Cather won thePutlizer Prize for the Novel.
It carried Cathers fine prose, especially when the object was the Nebraska landscape and life on the prairie, However, this story dominated by the atrocities of World Warand its significance to the protagonists sense of purpose was not palatable reading and I was not convinced by its line of thought or indeed the suggestion that a dull life can be saved by war.


Claude Wheeler is a farmers son who wishes to go to university but is bound by family obligations to till the land.
He marries a girl he loves and who evidently cares for him, but who would much rather become a missionary.
Poor Claude is intensely unhappy, In some ways, he reminds me of John Williams Stoner, also a farmers son who has loftier aspirations, Whereas Stoner finds purpose in literary studies and eventually academia, Claude discovers his selfworth in taking up arms and fighting in WWI.
To his buddy, David Gerhardt, Claude said, , . . I never knew there was anything worth living for, till this war came on, Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition, Becoming a lieutenant in the army opens up Claudes limited social circle and gives him a new purpose for living.
Both Stoner and Claude have wives who shun physical intimacy and made marriage a death bed, However, this is where their similarity ends, Whereas Stoner explores the worthy life in a deeply moving and persuasive manner, One of Ours holds up an ideal that rings a bit hollow.


Of the sound of the guns, Claude reflects, What they said was, that men could still die for an idea and would burn all they had made to keep their dreams.
He knew the future of the world was safe, . . It is another way of saying, 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, ' At no point in his fiveyear involvement in the warfront in France did he once spare a thought for his mother and housekeeper who loved him dearly.
Long marches, trench warfare, constant bombardment, broken limbs, rotting corpses, including an epidemic that claimed the lives of many comrades, hunger, starvation, certainty of death these are the harsh realities of war.
Yet Claude did not once long for home, In fact, Claude comes across wooden and his affections muted, He has comrades in arms whom he admires and loves, but when they are blown to smithereens, Claude greets their loss impassively.
All this adds up to a hero who seems distant and hard to warm up to, And because the story was told from Claudes point of view, it fell flat for me,

This is the first Willa Cather book that left me dissatisfied, and yet it won Cather a Putlizer.
I must not have read it in the spirit it was intended, Maybe, my friends can enlighten me, This novel is fascinating for many reasons, Published in, Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize inand it was welldeserved,

One of the fascinations for me is that people are people are people, Although there was a gentler and more polite tone within and between people, they still had the same thoughts and feelings and wonderings as people in our current times.


Willa Cathers writing has a way of discovering the inner depths of people and through their thoughts and impressions, we feel their feelings and experience their thoughts.
One of the oldtimers who had settled this area of Nebraska many years ago , . . had watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page where once only the wind wrote its story.


Much of this book centres on and through Claudes life his experiences as a young man determining who he is and what he is here for.
Where does he fit in his family What is it he is meant to do Who will he share his life with In one sweet scene, They lingered awhile, however, listening to the soft, amiable bubbling of the spring a wise unobtrusive voice, murmuring night and day, continually telling the truth to people who could not understand it.


In this way, we come to know the people in this novel and discover that they their lives and sensibilities are not so much different than our own.
There is also a war emerging WWI, as it turns out, There are many immigrants in the area who fled European homes to find a better life for themselves in a land with what appeared to be better opportunities.


Yet, then as now, war changes everything, When indiscreet or even overtly aggressive comments are made, neighbours sometimes turned on neighbours and brought charges against each other for speaking “unpatriotic” words:

Defendant: “I have nothing to say.
The charges are true. I thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind, ”
Judge: “Yes, a man can speak his mind, but even here he must take the consequences.
Sit down, please. ”

For me, it is the blend of the inner and outer worlds of her characters that truly stands out in Willa Cathers writing.
Her clearsighted compassion, her love of nature and the many lessons it displays, the inner and outer conflicts that are sometimes soothed by the individuals environment and other times exacerbated by that same environment.
I loved reading this novel and for those who enjoy reading older prizewinning novels, this is definitely a mustread, For those who love stories that flow with wisdom and beauty amidst our human travails, this novel will bring great satisfaction, too.

ThePulitzer doesn't exactly stand out from Cather's other works, but there are some things she does more intensely here than anywhere else.
She slows the story down, relying more on her storytelling mastery, and she brings in critical research and eyewitness interviews.


This is a World War I book, and Cather is quoted as hating that classification, But it's here she takes us to France, into the trenches and so on, Inspired by a close neighbor who was a casualty of war, Cather, the one time news reporter, went to France and walked the battle fields, and interviewed numerous veterans.
And, of course, she partially grew up in Nebraska, Claude Wheeler, her main character, is partially her neighbor, and, apparently, partially Cather herself,

There is nothing about WWI in the opening, and no foreshadowing, no hint, Cather is again writing about Nebraska and, again, from a different perspective, Claude is the son of a prosperous farmer who has the money to send him away to school, in Lincoln Nebraska, but not the interest.
So Claude, who never seems to get anything right, suffers through a secondrate religious school run by closeminded ministers who he can see through, and then comes home and works the farm, with a few other characters, all wonderfully drawn.
Claude's dad is especially curious, outwardly kindly, inwardly sharp, calculating and all business, Claude will see through some of this, but still get worked over by his father, then stumble into a marriage without the awareness of what he's doing, and then have to figure out what to do next.
Seems he never is able to see too far ahead, and neither are we,

All this takes half the book, Cather takes us through casually, and it's terrific, Of course, this is a WWI book, and Claude will volunteer and leave little behind beyond a compromised mother who is happy to see him off another terrific and complicated character.


I'm going to leave this review off here because WWI has its own draw, and an effort at an accurate depiction will draw in whomever it does, and, as always, leave us readers wondering what is rosy and what is real.
I think it's safe to say Cather doesn't flinch from anything, but she is hopelessly in love with atmosphere and landscape and she couldn't possibly keep herself in those trenches without a walk around.
Also, her last page is worth the rest of book, I can't keep myself from adding that Homer and Virgil seem to be in every book I read recently, The simple tricks Homer uses in the Odyssey to keep the listener's attention as the story switches gears, toying with the underworld, arguably the central part of Virgil's Aeneid, and have their echo here too.
Travel in general and the underworld, specifically, with its mixed awful and cleansing properties, seem to be cornerstones in all literature.


Cather so far comes

recommended by me in all forms, Here is another. Terrific stuff.



. One of Ours by Willa Cather
published:
format: Kindle book roughlypages
acquired: August
read: Sep
time reading:hrmin,.
min/page
rating:½ I'm crying as I write this review And it was a book for class

This book is set during World War I, but the first half of this book talks about the main character's life at home and how he feels discontent with working on the farm and discontent with the marriage he fell into and discontent with living a life that was meaningless.
I thought his inner struggle was so compelling and even somewhat relatable, and I adored his personality as well,

The latter half of this book is when he is deployed to France, a section I felt was a bit dryer because the descriptions grew a lot more geographical and clinical descriptions of machinery and war and I wish it had stayed as characterbased.
By the end of the book, I couldn't remember which generals/lieutenants/colonels were who, Nevertheless, there were some very powerful passages at the end that just tore me up, even though I don't entirely understand what exactly just happened.
Maybe after we discuss this in class tomorrow it'll be able to sit better with me, but I feel as if I'm wanting a little bit more

Regardless, it's a gorgeously crafted story that goes beyond a war narrative to explain the troubles in his home life and his inner personal struggle, which I loved.
I totally get why it won the Pulitzer, The Nebraska half of the novel is good, I just couldn't get behind what Cather had to say about the experience of war once Claude goes to France.
I have no doubt that many, many wonderful people find a home and a meaningful life in the military, I just struggle with the message that World War I trench combat made anyone's life whole, I've never been a soldier and I've never been in a war, but I've read the stories of many talented writers who've lived that experience and this story didn't ring true.
At one point, an army officer thinks about scolding his soldiers for mixing with French women who had been living in a territory just freed from Germans but decides not to because it would be like scolding birds.
You could basically say the same about reviewing Cather, There is no defining why exactly I love her writing so much, You could say she writes about Prairies or rural life so beautifully and you could say, about this particular book, that she created a magnification character in Claude an idealist whose wish for an idealist world was left unfulfilled in an increasingly materialist thanks to indsutrial revolution and consumerism world, who seems like a man born in a wrong era and yearns for good old days when there were proper social connections, a man who feels the dullness of inactivity of Utopialike happy Society he is forever to live in.
until the world war I comes in giving him an opportunity to fight for his ideals to show to him that there are people still willing to die for an idea His need for a war, to be able to play the hero, the lack of purpose he would feel in peace he fights for all kind of reminds one of Captain America.
. But saying all that is still not doing justice enough to Cather, She writes far more like poetry and the poetry is made of material of emotions that, unlike words, refuting analysis in their purest forms.
In Father's case, the emotion used as material in three books by her I have read is same, Longing. .