Where the Red Light Shines - "All Quiet on the Western Front"

"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men."

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

With a striking war plot that alternates between vivid episodes on the battlefield and moments of normalcy and peace, All Quiet on the Western Front written in 1929 really ices the cake of what constitutes vivid writing. This first-person telling of a brutal time in history from the perspective of one German soldier's experience really illuminates a beam of reality unlike any other war story in fiction. A vivid yet elegant telling of the war against Germany, it really sucks the reader down into the trenches right alongside the characters and offers a fresh taste of the blood they spilled.

So why read the book instead of search for the movie version on Netflix? It was originally banned and burned by the Nazis after publication, making it notably more famous than it would have been without such poor reception. Although All Quiet on the Western Front was labeled as an anti-war and pacifist novel, critics continue to call it one of the most appalling and violent accounts of what really happened to the soldiers in the war.

The tale is for no faint of heart squirmer. Gruesome realities include hacked limbs, blown brains, skeletal starvation and eating out of garbage cans to survive. Yet some would say the more wretched and R rated the story, the more it makes readers chomp at the bit. Quite simply, this is one of the most loved and hated war novels of all time. So, where do you fall on the spectrum of book-burning judgment on this graphic literary work?