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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780449215579
ISBN number: 0449215571
Label: Fawcett
Manufacturer: Fawcett
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 800
Printing Date: April 12, 1988
Publishing house: Fawcett
Release Date: April 12, 1988
Sale Popularity Level: 226200
Studio: Fawcett
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Product Description:
In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. A compelling chronicle of humans in conflict with inhuman events, GONE TO SOLIDERS is an unforgettable reading experience and a stirring tribute to the remarkable survival of the human spirit.
'Panoramic...This is a sweeping epic in the best sense.'
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
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Rated by buyers 
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This book has to be read more than once to catch all the nuances....great stories, interesting perspective on "regular" folks of the period (hot socialist divorcee authors? Bisexuality? Cloak and Dagger? Jews -vs-Poles in Detroit)...just great writing. I've found this to be the only one of her books I could read, but it's wonderful.
Rated by buyers 
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I rarely read sagas, but since several friends recommended this, I gave it a try. Now I remember why I'm usually careful about which ones I read. It doesn't help when many of the characters are just plain not likeable. Oscar and Abra? Eeeeuwww!!!! Daniel and Gloria? Eeeeuwww!!!! Zach and Bernice? Gross!!!! I guess if you think World War II was about desperate people having sex this book is for you. Plus the coincidence of characters crossing was beyond belief. In the context of this being a "serious historical novel" I find that inexcusable.
Some of the historical parts were interesting - Murray (with his nine lives) in the Pacific, Danielle's activities with the French Resistance, the bombings of London.
Years ago I read Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" and I remembered that it kept me spellbound. A great, popular WWII saga. For insight into the American experience both and home and abroad try Studs Terkel's "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II"
Rated by buyers 
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Written in the heyday of the "feminist" novel, Marge Piercy's "Gone to Soldiers" presents a snapshot of American history - only it's not the history we're led by the jacket blurbs to expect. Instead, it's a framework of late 20th century feminist dogma about life and people projected backward in time and super-imposed over the events of WWII.
All the obligatory sterotypes are here: the intelligent, creative woman denied her rightful self-actualization and fulfillment by imprisoning family obligations (no less than three versions of this type); the artistic bisexual male; the repressed spinster who uncovers her lesbian identity; the semi-androgynous girl heroine who is smarter, stronger and more capable than the men around her...and on and on. Abortion, divorce, aggressive female sex and broken families are an unqualified good. Conversely, every hetero white male is either a sexual brute, a timorous mouse or an adulterous slob. The American government/military is simultaneously hopelessly inept and pregnant with unspoken menace. Intact family life is, at best, a pitiable exercise, or at worst, a repressive prison. You get the picture.
This mindset exhibits itself in the characters' thoughts and reactions. A case in point: one of Piercy's women, a writer of popular ladies' fiction, obtains a post with the OSS in Washington. She finds that the men in her department barely listen to her ideas, and that she has little influence on policy. This, she immediately assumes, is the result of Washington's "patriarchal" climate and of sexual discrimination. Oh. It never seems to enter her mind that, perhaps, the men don't listen to her because she doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, that she is underqualified, that her past experience hasn't prepared her to make a serious contribution, that she is in over her head. No, because she's a woman, she must, BY DEFINITION, automatically be a victim of oppression because of her sex, regardless of the objective measure of her talents and skills. It would be a touch of genius if Piercy were objective enough to have conveyed this attitude in her heroine without sharing it herself. One gets the feeling, though, that Piercy is merely using the character to express a deeply entrenched personal conviction.
The novel is a sprawling affair, and Piercy keeps a commendable grasp of her multiple storylines. She also has a good mastery of shifting points of view. These afford some nice crossovers, linking in fresh ways the characters with which she peoples her landscape. The weakness lies in her characterizations. There is a depressing sameness in the personalities that the reader joins behind the eyes of her characters. The men, especially, are poorly drawn. They thoroughly lack a masculine psychology; they're merely congolomerations of feminine thought patterns and reactions with men's names appended and dialogue that's rougher and less refined. Piercy, unfortunately, just does not know how to write believable men.
By no stretch of the imagination is this a historical WWII novel. It's what WWII would have been, if everyone had been preoccupied with concerns that were at least two generations in the future. From a perspective of twenty years after its publication, the novel is an interesting study on an outworn worldview receding just as surely as WWII into the past.
Rated by buyers -
Marge Piercy is a writer I admire. As a person I admire her more. She has done a lot for writers, particularly women and minority writers. This book helped because the sales from the book and different rights for movies and TV mini series that were never made helped Marge obtain financial independence for her modest life, so she can devote more of it to writing, her spiritual and social vision, and less of it to teaching classes and doing poetry reading for cash.
This book isn't going to please a hard-core World War II history buff like myself. Nor will it please those like myself who believe the US, Britain and France were equally evil as Germany, Japan, and Italy. Moreover, Marge Piercy was forced to omit a planned segment on the war against the Soviet Union because she could not get funding for research on it.
However, if you like story telling, and you like the social, sexual, and political vision that Marge Piercy's non-sci-fi books express, you will enjoy this book. You will be taken through the times and the war from the point of view of working folks. You will see this world in a pro-Feminist view.
You will hang on and turn pages and feel the release the end of the war must have been, even as Marge is showing how the war was the beginning of things like the CIA marriage with academia.
This is the kind of book that you wish was longer.
Piercy as a novelist is not one of the great prose artists, nor is she one to produce subtle or delicately complex plots. She writes straight, hard and direct. Sometimes, you do feel a little bogged down by what I call her "sociology"--where the Marge is explaining social, political, and economic facts of life for her characters. Of course, most writers don't care about those aspects of life, particularly for the working people that Marge Piercy loves.
What Marge does is gives you a story, real people doing real things that you will care about and will give you a different message than 99 percent of the other offers. If you want fine words, check out Marge's many works of poetry where she is a great artist, intimate with words, judicious in their use, but never fooling around, always with something real to say.
Viva La Piercy!
Rated by buyers 
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If you are looking for a soap opera, you will like this book. The storyline is interesting, but the background of WWII is an interesting canvas. The book is very long (nearly 800 pages) and much of it is fluff. It can become tedious. Fortunately, it is divided into chapters by character, so if you don't connect with one you can skim their chapters and focus on others.
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