Book Review Of Rites Of Spring By Eksteins

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Modris Eksteins, who was born in Latvia and immigrated to Canada as a young child with his parents and sister in the 1950s, published the Rites of Spring: The Great War and Birth of the Modern Age in 1989 and the work has since been named one of the best one hundred books published in Canada by The Literary Review of Canada. Just by reading the title the audience is becomes aware that the book is about the First World War. Even without opening the book some may be able to infer that Eksteins believes there is a relationship between the First World War and the modern age. The title Eksteins chose for his book, which is in reference to a ballet that is discussed within the book, is able to convey part of his argument to the audience without …show more content…
Eksteins explains that overnight Lindbergh became the most famous man ever, because as he argues, Lindbergh “flew for no one, not even for mankind. He flew for himself.” Furthermore, according to Eksteins, Lindbergh satisfied two worlds through his achievement. The first world contained values of positive accomplishment, grace and the recognition of achievement based on effort, courage and preparation. The second, more modern world, was equally as exhilarated by Lindbergh’s achievement, which had used machine and technology to overcome nature. Lindbergh was the perfect modern day hero because the “old authority and traditional values no longer had any credibility." Eksteins ends his chapter on Lindbergh by arguing that his achievement revealed that the prewar from of modernism had shifted to America. Now the working classes of Europe were fascinated by the concept of the American dream and saw it as a happy ending to their own …show more content…
The majority of the early reviews for the book argued that it presented “the truth about the war.” On the contrary, to the conservative right, Remarque’s work was dangerous because it threatened the meaning of postwar conservatism and now if the war was seen to be absurd the as a set of beliefs, conservatism was also absurd. For Germans in particular, as stated by one German commentator, ‘“the reader tends to feel that this book has located the source of all our difficulties.”’ Remarque’s work helped to show the German soldier during the First World War as not different from soldiers of other countries. Although the book had great success in its beginning years, once Hitler came to power in 1933 Remarque’s book was one of many burned symbolically for being ‘“politically and morally un-German.”’ All Quiet on the Western Front, for Eksteins, represented a shift to modern culture through literacy. This book was able to show a different side to the argument and change the opinions of those effected by the

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