Dos Passos's attempt to expose the reader to the plight of the common American enlisted man in WWI rarely manages to achieve the impact one suspects he must have been seeking. It's not about the horrors of battle at all--the three soldiers of the title encounter no real fighting, and half the book takes place after the armistice. Rather, the book is about the horrors inflicted on the minds and spirits of men by the military machine and its inhuman procedures. Dos Passos does this by bludgeoning the reader with the endless drudgery of the soldiers' existence as they meet in boot camp and make their way to France. His three soldiers as clearly meant to cut across the strata of American society: Italian-American San Franciscan, Midwestern farm boy, Harvard-educated pianist, and he clearly shows how they all get ground down and reduced to nothing by the army. In doing so, the book becomes more of an anti-war, pro-personal freedom manifesto than it is a story with a plot. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just isn't done very delicately and thus makes for a rather tedious read. In the end, it's clear why this is considered a rather minor work by an American great.

"Three Soldiers" is John Dos Passos before he found his voice. With the originality of style and narrative punch of "Manhattan Transfer" and "USA" still a few years away, this overlooked writer gave us a good look at the common soldier during and after World War I that is well-written but which occasionally gets bogged down with repetition and the lack of a storyline. Yeah, I know, the repetition and social slavery of the soldier are part of what Dos Passos is trying to get across, but that doesn't make portions like the interminable "The World Outside" section any easier to read. This is probably only considered a classic because of what Dos Passos wrote later. I guess I was expecting World War I to play a larger role, but it really is only a backdrop; there is almost no actual fighting in the entire book, and the novel is less than half over when the war ends (a shame, it was just starting to gather momentum). If you're going to write about the war, at least let us experience some of its horrors with the characters. Still, it is generally a good book, the writing is fine and insightful if, again, a little redundant (the constant description of colors -- the night, nature, etc., got a bit old). But quite nice and recommended as a way to be led into his better works.

An earlier work than his superior "1919," "Three Soldiers" is a little more raw and a little more focused on the human reaction to war's butchery.

Unlike "1919" and the USA Trilogy's plethora of characters, "Three Soldiers" focuses simply on, well three soldiers, John Andrews (the Harvard private) in particular. Dos Passos does not set the conflict in the trenches of the Western Front, indeed you will barely find one page of combat. Dos Passos sets the conflict in the emotions and psyche of his main characters. How they respond to the culture that induced them into the war, how they rebel against the stultifying rhythms of army life. As a reader, I sympathized. Dos Passos's characters are endlessly repeating the same cafe scenes.

Here's my favorite passage from Dos Passos' "Three Soldiers":

"In the light of the one flickering lamp that made an unsteady circle of reddish glow on the station platform Fuselli looked at his pass. From Reveille on February fourth to Reveille on February fifth he was a free man. His eyes smarted with sleep as he walked up and down the cold station platform. For twenty-four hours he wouldn't have to obey anybody's orders. Despite the loneliness of going away on a train in a night like this in a strange country Fuselli was happy. He clinked the money in his pocket.

Down the track a red eye appeared and grew nearer. He could hear the hard puffing of the engine up the grade. Huge curves gleamed as the engine roared slowly past him. A man with bare arms black with coal dust was leaning out of the cab, lit up from behind by a yellowish red glare. Now the cars were going by, flat cars with guns, tilted up like the muzzles of hunting dogs, freight cars out of which here and there peered a man's head. The train almost came to a stop. The cars clanged one against the other all down the train. Fuselli was looking into a pair of eyes that shone in the lamplight; a hand was held out to him.

"So long, kid," said a boyish voice. "I don't know who the hell you are, but so long; good luck."

"So long," stammered Fuselli. "Going to the front?" "Yer goddam right," answered another voice.

The train took up speed again; the clanging of car against car ceased and in a moment they were moving fast before Fuselli's eyes. Then the station was dark and empty again, and he was watching the red light grow smaller and paler while the train rumbled on into the darkness."

Dos Passos is always good, so Brazil on the Move is good, too. If you're looking for a detailed nonfiction book on Brazil, this one is great. And if you're not particularly interested in Brazil, you'll at least feel a confident knowledge on the subject. It's hard to find this title, though, so if you get your hands on it by any chance, you should definitely appreciate the opportunity to read it.

John Dos Passos wrote this history of World War One in 1962, and much of it appeals to my nostalgia for the great ideas that were expected to make the world safe for democracy in that century. Dos Passos is sensitive to the progressive issues which were supposed to make politics meaningful to ordinary participants in the process, but the end of the book runs into prohibition, the moralistic attempt to legislate the end of all evils, which produced an economy of booming illegality and immorality on a scale that this book does not attempt to encompass. Wilson's great wish, when the Treaty of Versailles was placed before the Senate, was, as Wilson put it, "The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression and the world must be given peace . . . It has come about by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way." (p. 483). This is at the beginning of Chapter 24, which is called "The Supremest Tragedy."

President Wilson, somewhere in this book, is asking the people who are talking to him for a continuation of his ideal: please find an American president who can think of the entire world to come after him. He did not mean that American corporations need to acquire the right to see the whole world as booty in their quest for profits. Personal details on how Wilson actually perceived the world include the Wilsons preparing for "the final longdrawn ceremonies of a dinner at the Elysee Palace:" (p. 482):

(When the invitation came from Poincare Wilson flew off the handle. He vowed he would not sit down at table with the swine. It was as if all the resentment of the frustrations suffered in Paris were focussed into hatred of the stubby little President of the French Republic. It was all House and Henry White could do to convince him that not to accept the invitation would cause an international incident. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson had already clinched the matter by getting a special dress for the occasion designed for her by Worth.) (p. 482).

One of the major characters in this book is Teddy Roosevelt, who became President in September 1901 after President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, in the Temple of Music of the Pan-American Exposition. The assassin declared that he had been inspired by "Emma Goldman who was inciting working people in Chicago to bring about the triumph of right and justice through anarchy. . . . The Chicago police arrested Emma Goldman but the judge turned her loose for lack of evidence. Editorials demanded the deportation of foreign anarchists." (p. 4). This book keeps bringing in T.R. as representative of the politics of these times until he was "too weak to talk." (p. 432). "By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill." (p. 433). There was a Congressional election campaign shortly before the armistice is 1918. Late in July T.R.'s youngest son, Quentin, "had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai." (p. 432). T.R. made a campaign appearance "in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his teeth and waving his arms with his legendary zest" (p. 432):

On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson's conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted. (T.R. hadn't been able to get Wilson's war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.) (p. 432).
Photograph number 25 from 1916 shows a campaign truck with a sign on the front that says:

VOTE FOR WILSON
PEACE WITH HONOR
PROSPERITY
PREPAREDNESS

On the side: WHO KEEPS US OUT OF WAR?

The captions on the photos are brief, as skimpy as subtitles in a silent movie. By 1916, "on the western front the British had lost half a million men and the French nearer two million, with the gain of only an occasional thousand yards of shellpocked mud on the Flanders front." (p. 156). Wilson's Secretary of War, Lindley Garrison, and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge resigned because they favored universal military service while Wilson still thought "that the Administration could not move faster towards military preparation than the people moved." (p. 160). Eight soldiers and eight civilians were killed in Columbus, New Mexico by several hundred men led by Villa on March 9, which was about the size of any problem an American Secretary of War ought to be able to handle, and "Wilson picked a man after his own heart. Newton D. Baker was a progressive reformer and a Wilson man from long before Baltimore. He was reputed to be an ardent pacifist." (p. 161).

There are some exciting descriptions of the war in France and the confusing situation in Russia at that time. Details like "The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products." (p. 297). People couldn't use the internet to plan their trips, back then.

The novel, while well written, is a bit dry and observational. However, the ideas it presents, notably what discourse an oppressed people has, have parallels with situations in the West Bank and Sept 11.

I bought this Feral House paperback reprint of The Bomb because it was the only one readily available. I'm now tempted to track down an older edition from one of the many used book sellers on the Internet, because Feral House's edition is very poor. The text is riddled with typographical errors to the extent that it is occasionally hard to be sure exactly what a sentence is supposed to mean. (Feral House likes to call themselves "the publisher that refuses to be tamed"; I prefer to think of them as "the publisher that refuses to hire a proofreader".) The new afterword by a modern anarchist "thinker" is, to be charitable, witless, doctrinaire nonsense. It adds nothing to the book. John dos Passos' introduction (borrowed from an earlier edition) is mean-spirited and rather contemptible, but its capsule biography of Frank Harris may be useful to those who know little of his life.

The novel itself is very good, though the novel's focus, the semi-fictitious anarchist Louis Lingg, is a bit too perfect to be believed. He's really not so much a believable character as an author mouthpiece in the style of Ayn Rand's John Galt or Robert Heinlein's Jubal Harshaw. The book is a compelling read nevertheless, and I recommend it highly.

I really liked the way this book was written. Full of descriptions, it tells a story of love, a great friendship and a life that immigrants had and in some ways still have to live in a new country. The book is written in such a way that it makes a reader think that the author, not the protagonist, threw the bomb. It is worth of your money and of your time to read it.