Use this guide to learn about the various books on modern warfare, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Nigerian Civil War, the Liberian Civil Wars, the Sierra Leone Civil War, the US-Afghan War, the Iraq War, and the ongoing Ukraine War and the War on Gaza. Goodwin's Hoffman Family Library has an abundance of literary resources including books, eBooks, online journals, and more.
War Literature is a genre where the story's primary action takes place either on the battlefield or in a civilian setting. The goal is to document and memorialize the experience so the history won't be forgotten. Most war literature books contain aspects of resilience, hope, tragedy, futility, comradeship, patriotism, trauma, irony, and violence. Literature of war aims to contextualize the struggles, victories, and losses within the larger frame of history and knowledge.
This genre can include both fiction and nonfiction works. Many fictional accounts are based on true stories with a few additional creative liberties to emphasize the themes, help the flow of the story, and fill in the gaps. For this guide, nonfiction works consist of narrative nonfiction, such as autobiographies and memoirs.
Tim O'Brien, Vietnam War veteran and esteemed author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried wrote, "War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery, and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
This multi-disciplinary, full-text database is designed specifically for academic institutions. This collection of 3,865 full-text, scholarly publications provides journal coverage for nearly all academic areas of study - including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.
Literary Reference Source is a rich full-text literary database covering all genres and time periods. It includes thousands of synopses, critical essays, book reviews, literary journals and author biographies, plus full-text classic novels, short stories and poems.