There are indeed so many books and articles about it. I'm forever thinking "OK I'm done with WWI once I read this last book"... but of course how I got to "this last book" was usually by reference in some footnote in the previous book I'd read... and of course I will read the footnotes in these two books as well, so... breadcrumb trails to the next books,,,, I haz dem.
That war was called The Great War (in our too brief ignorance after its end) but I'm starting to think of it as the endless one
even if pursuing the history of its origins is by my own choice. I need to leave time, sadly enough, for understanding more of the great and "minor" wars that have ensued.
Next up for me are some books about the Bangladesh Liberation War. First along that line is Gary Bass' book
Blood Telegram. The title refers to the cable from Archer Blood, then consul general in Dacca (now Dhaka), that was signed by 20 US diplomatic staff. It dissented strongly from Nixon-Kissinger policy, which in its anti-Communist zeal and distaste for India's politics of the era, had sided with Pakistan in ignoring the slaughter of Bengalis in East Pakistan. I plan to read Archer Blood's memoir of the era as well.
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But meanwhile I have embarked on reading Hicham Matar's memoir
The Return, a wrenching account of separation, exile, search and half-mourning for a lost father. Matar was born in NYC, lived in Libya and then in Cairo as a child, was educated in England and now divides his time between London and New York where he has taught at Barnard. The book won the 2017 Pulitzer for biography or autobiography. The author's father was an outspoken Libyan dissident and activist against Qaddafi; he was abducted in Cairo in 1990 by Egyptian secret service agents, handed over to the Libyan government and imprisoned at the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
The father apparently survived the 1996 slaughter of more than a thousand political prisoners, as there was word in 2002 that he had been seen in a different and secret prison, alive but frail. In interviews, Hicham Matar has said that after the fall of Qaddafi, it was when the remaining political prisoners were all released but his father was not among them that acknowledgment of his dad's death began to seem inescapable. He did return to Libya in 2012 and saw extended family members who had survived imprisonment, but the window was closing on free movement even then as the Islamic State gained strength, and he left Libya behind for what he has seemed to decide was the last time.
In encountering one reference to a older cousin of Matar's, a guy who had been imprisoned for dissidence in the mid 1970s for several years, I was stunned to think about what it would be like to grow up where for most of your life your family was subject to kidnapping or imprisonment and death for having expressed political views. Even as a child the author experienced times with his father when it was clear they were being stalked while living in Libya or later in exile, and he was cautioned not to look around at the followers, not to acknowledge his real name if someone called out to him and so forth. One begins to understand the idea that there's no such thing really as "going back" to places of the heart when they must be remembered so differently after changes like that have taken place.
