All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front
by 

Erich Maria Remarque

Timmy Cham's review

Jul 09, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

The truth be told, I started reading this book in 2005. I set it aside back then, promising I'd read it later. Well, here I am finally finishing it up :)

This book's been called "the greatest war book ever written." I see why. It easily fits in my list of memorable war books--next to Crane's The Red Badge of Courage about the Civil War and Michael Herr's Dispatches about the Vietnam War.

The book, especially, brings across how war destroys the idealism and zest-for-life of youth. And the book spares no details about the brutality that is war: "A hospital alone shows what war is like," writes Remarque.

Definitely would read this book again.

The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth

The Odessa File
by 

Frederick Forsyth

Timmy Cham's review

Jun 28, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

Read 2 times. Last read June 24, 2020.

The history books tell us that the Nazis were defeated and scattered in World War II. But what if, in 1963, a number of former SS officials (self-organized into a group called "ODESSA," acronym for Organizsation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) plotted with the Egyptians to manufacture thousands of rockets fitted with bubonic-plague and "dirty bomb" warheads? The rockets' target would be obvious: Israel. The goal: to execute Hitler's "Final Solution," two decades after his death.

Forsyth's classic espionage thriller starts from this nightmarish premise. (How much of it is true? Forsyth won't say--"it is in this [book's] ability to perplex the reader as to how much is true and how much is false that much of the grip of the story lies," he writes.) The evil plot ends up (rather unwittingly) unraveled by a young German reporter, Peter Miller, whose dogged and ingenious pursuit of the hidden "Butcher of Riga" makes for feverish reading.

(Note: The "Butcher of Riga," Eduard Roschmann, was indeed an actual concentration-camp commandant. He was still alive when Forsyth published his book in 1972. According to Wikipedia, The Butcher died in Paraguay in 1977.