50 / A Brief Book Review

With all the travel I've been doing, I have found lots of time for reading. In London, Sheila Willmore recommended Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks. A harrowing tale of World War I, Faulks says the title "is intended to bear several meanings, but the most important is to sugges tthe indifference of the natural world to the human - human, as Philip Roth has put it, in the worst sense of the word." In fact, the book is meant to suggest that the nature of human action in the world we create is unlimited - in this case in a negative direction. Birdsong is convincing that the horrors of the Second World War, the war I know more about, and that I have always assumed was precedential in this respect, were merely a continuation of the unlimited world of horrors created and discovered by humans in the "Great War."