Customer Reviews

The Human War

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Imagine if Sartre and de Beauvoir battled it out on The Jerry Springer Show, and you get an idea what reading this book is like. Noah Cicero is one of the most amazing voices in fiction I've ever discovered. Remember the first time you read Bukowski, Miller, or Ginsberg's HOWL? Reading this book was like that for me: it just riveted me to the back of my seat and made me shake my head in wonder.

Noah's great innovation is the "sentegraph": prose so clipped that each line becomes poetry; the perfect obverse of "vers libre" poets who simply write prose with irregular line breaks. Noah comes screaming from the rust belt hell of Youngstown, Ohio, but don't expect just another sad-sack, Harvey Pekar type of artist: Cicero is young, brilliant, fearless, and completely original. He hangs out in Denny's and goes to strip bars and, in this book--written on the eve of the Gulf War II--rages against war and politics and the horror and emptiness the eve of war has caused him.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I hope this has helped.

The Human War is a really good book. it is easy to read. it is funny and also insightful but never in a way that seems like the author is trying too hard. the book is about an individual's experience during the beginning of the war in iraq. probably my favorite thing about it, is that it doesn't try to define the war, or the situation or anything universal. the book examines one person's reaction, as he talks to other individuals. the end result is that nothing is determined, and each person must go on living as a single person, while things like war, absurdity, and interpersonal relationships threaten to discover the meaninglessness of life. i recommend this for fans of sartre, bukowski, and heidegger.

If you think sentences--single sentences. You know the type: unmarried, lonesome, etc-- describe a particular aspect of the core of your being, then you're in luck because Cicero delves right into the problem of trying to get you to disagree with yourself in that those sentences really hate you.

This was the first Noah Cicero book I read. I think I read it in 2006. I liked it a lot and felt excited after reading it. It's funny, emotional, interesting, highly readable, short. I think there were some dolphin similes and I liked them. I recommend all of Noah's other books also. I think my favorite of his so far is "The Insurgent."

I really like this book. It's honest. The language is honest. Noah is effectively communicating with The Human War.

Buy this book.