The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895, 117 pages)

Google Reader is closing down on July first so if you follow my blog there, for which I greatly thank you, you need to find another RSS reader very soon.   I have tried several.  The best to me so far is Bloglovin'' and then Feedly.  Both have a direct simple method of importing your Google reader subscriptions. If you Google "replacements for Google Reader" you will see the web pages for these readers and others.   Google has hurt the book  blog world by this action but I guess maybe it is somehow progress.  You can also follow my blog by e mail subscriptions or via Twitter as @thereadinglife.   I have used Google reader for years and will miss it a lot.  I just cannot get crazy for Google Plus.

I last read The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1870 to 1900, New Jersey, USA) several decades ago.  I as motivated to reread it by Edmund White's novel about the last year of Crane's life, Hotel de Dream.  I wish I had a book blog post from long ago so I could see what I thought of the work  when I read it first.   Crane never experienced a battle before writing The Red Badge of Courage when he was barely twenty one.  The work follows the military career of a young New York man in the American Civil War.  By consensus it is one of the classics of American literature and it considered comparable to the very best world wide of battle literature depicting war from the point of view of the foot soldier.  Much of the power of the book is seeing how the battles take the man, really a boy, from callow youth eager for battle against demonized enemies to a much different person as the work closes.   Crane's descriptions of the horrors of war and its absurdity are very powerful.    

Mel u