Friday, June 26, 2009

The Junior Officer's Reading Club



This is from Boyd Tonkin's Independent review today of Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officer's Reading Club. Sounds like a book of our times. Can't wait. Can see the HBO series already.
...his tale's true originality lies in Hennessey's media-saturated reflections on media-shaped campaigns. Here, postmodernism dons desert fatigues. These kids act like a band of brothers in part because they watch Band of Brothers. Prior to one encounter, they prime themselves with the supremely silly Spartans-vs-Persians anime, 300. As for their video montages of real skirmishes, "the work of a few hours" on standard laptop software, they have "changed the way soldiers went to war".

And that Reading Club? More DVDs than books, it seems. Can't help thinking how an E-book version could link to all the rap, computer games, movies, and web-ephemera...

No comments: