Dear Reader

Welcome to BookCrossing and thanks for being a part of World Book Night 2011, the largest book giveaway in history. 1,000,000 specially printed copies of 25 different books changed hands on March 5th 2011 and began their journey from reader to reader. This book is one of them. World Book Night has joined with BookCrossing to help track these books as they travel. You can be a part of that journey by making a comment in the book's journal here on BookCrossing. Your journal entry can say how you got the book, what you thought of it, your plans for it or whatever else you might like to add.

On BookCrossing you may choose to remain anonymous or join (it's free). If you join, you’ll be alerted by e-mail each time someone makes another journal entry for this specific copy of this book (other copies of the book are travelling with their own ID number. Every copy of every book has a unique ID). It’s all confidential (you’re known only by your screen name and no one is ever given your e-mail address) and spam-free.

Thanks in advance for being part of World Book Night and BookCrossing. And happy reading and sharing.

This book is being released via BookCrossing on 5 March 2011 as part of the inaugural World Book Night. With the full support of the Publishers Association, the Booksellers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Reading Agency with libraries, World Book Day and the BBC, one million books will be given away by an army of passionate readers to members of the public across the UK and Ireland.

Read and release!

Received as part of world book night

One of forty-eight copies received as part of World Book Night. Posted to Aoife. Enjoy

This book is a cult classic and sits rightfully along others such as "The Catcher in the Rye" on many secondary school / highschool reading lists. It provides the reader with what appears to be a balanced insight into what life is like for young men who are lured into fighting wars they don't even understand, at a time of their lives when the decisions they make shouldn't result in life or death. I found it tough to make it to the end of the story, not because the writing was lacking, but because it is such a personal and painful telling of a tale undoubtedly shared by many. Remarque keeps his words simple, and this simplicity lends itself to a practical honesty - an honesty that allows the reader to experience the futility of war and the sadness of loss of innocence, whether at the hands of war or those who romanticise it.

Posted to Dublin, Ireland

I can see why Beefster found it tough to finish this book - in many ways, it's a very human discourse on war, and the grim slog towards the end reflects the war it reports on. There is little or no reference to strategy, politics, tactics or the units involved - instead the book focuses almost entirely on the human experience; everything from bodily functions to the myriad of ways that a life can be ended on a 20th century battlefied is presented on a human level. And while there is sympathy in the telling of the social and family background of the soldiers (of all sides), the fighting is presented in a detached and almost dehumanised way - the war has is presented as a struggle for survival rather than a political, strategic or economic conflict, with the surviving combatants walking victims of imperial ambition.

As someone who has read widely on the history of the war involved, and visited some of the battlefields, 'All Quiet on the Western Front' is a sobering reminder of what this war was like to fight in, and the profound effect it had on the psyche of Western Europe, souring modernism and technology for several generations, and creating a tension between European States that took a further and even more destructive conflict to resolve.

Sent to Co.Dublin