Five best books about looking at war from many angles

David Mamet, a playwright, screenwriter and film director, is the author of Theatre, recently published in paperback, and coming in June, The Secret Knowledge.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on looking at war from many angles.

One title on the list:

The Gallery
by John Horne Burns (1947)

Many famous books about war are, on subsequent readings, discovered to be incapable of dealing with war's central fact: terror. There is no shame in this. Hemingway's great war novels, "A Farewell to Arms" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls," deal with love; and war's indescribable terror is brought into relief by the constant presence of its opposite. John Horne Burns's "The Gallery" also concerns wartime love—homosexual love. But where Hemingway's tales coalesce around romance as a counterbalance to terror, the interconnected stories in "The Gallery" repress those romantic feelings while the terror looms. Burns—who served during World War II in North Africa and Italy—sets the book, mainly, in a gay bar in Naples after its liberation by the Allies. He writes about love, sex and loss, with but one scene of combat. I was having dinner with Gore Vidal some years ago and mentioned my discovery of Burns, who died in 1953 at age 36, and of "The Gallery." I said, timidly: "I think it's the best book to come out of the war." "My dear boy," Vidal replied, "I wrote that in my review in 1950."

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue