From Here to Eternity

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'I'll never understand the fucking Army.' 
 
Prew won't conform. He could have been the best boxer and the best bugler in his division, but he chooses the life of a straight soldier in Hawaii under the fierce tutelage of Sergeant Milt Warden. When he refuses to box for his company for mysterious reasons, he is given 'The Treatment', a relentless campaign of physical and mental abuse. Meanwhile, Warden wages his own campaign against authority by seducing the Captain's wife Karen - just because he can. Both men are bound to the Army, even though it may destroy them. 
 
Published here in its uncensored, original version, From Here to Eternity is a raw, electrifying account of the soldier's life in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor-of men who are trained to fight the enemy, but cannot resist fighting each other.

A blockbuster of a book... raw and brutal and angry

The achievement of an exceptional novelist... Filled with a wide range of human emotions, with humour and nobility, with rage and love, with savagery and tenderness

Extraordinary and utterly irresistable ... a compelling and compassionate story

Ferocious... the most realistic and forceful novel I've read about life in the army

The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the only writer of any time for whom I felt any love

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi belongs to William Faulkner ... A great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones

From Here to Eternity has fine qualities in abundance... No novel had so vividly - and shockingly, to a civilian readership - conveyed the brutality of peacetime army life

James Jones (1921-1977) was born in Robinson, Illinois and enlisted in the US army in 1939, serving in the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor and later in Guadalcanal in the Pacfic, where he was wounded in action. He drew on his wartime experiences in his many acclaimed novels, including the National Book Award-winner From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.

James Jones

The soldiers of C-for-Charlie Company are not cast from the heroic mold. The unit's captain is too intelligent and sensitive for the job, his first sergeant is psychotic, and the enlisted men begin the campaign gripped by cowardice. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad - and the living from the dead - when they arrive on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Based on James Jones' experience in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, The Thin Red Line is a raw and unsparing depiction of the senselessness and brutalizing impact of war.

James Jones

Books by James Jones

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