Customer Reviews

War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A vanishingly small percentage of Americans -- on the order of one percent -- have any direct experience of what life is like under our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're wars behind walls, and only under rare circumstances do Americans get to see an unfiltered, uncensored presentation of what life in those warzones is actually like. Even more rarely do Americans get access to the lower-profile conflicts that dot the developing world, too far outside our political aims or our military interests for most first-world reporters to even bother with them -- places like East Timor, Darfur, Somalia, places off the edge of the mental map for most Americans: the "Here Be Dragons" of the 24-hour-news-cycle age.

David Axe has spent the past few years going to those places first hand. In this comic, he gives us a retrospective on what he's seen and the reactions he's gone through, taking us with him as he confronts, both physically and mentally, the hollow brutality of modern warfare.

Matt Bor's spare, iconic art provides an excellent substrate for Axe's text, and together they show us a view of modern conflict that might not be possible in a more mainstream medium -- too ruthlessly realistic for hollywood, too graphically violent for television news, too strongly emotional for a newspaper.

If it has a flaw, it's that it's a little too personal -- the focus of the story is slightly more on what the experience of these conflicts has done to Axe's mind than it is on the conflicts themselves -- but that might be a necessary function of this kind of personal narrative. If you want a first-hand account of what it's like "over there" -- and you want to know more about what going "over there" might do to your mind and your worldview -- you won't go far wrong reading this.

The boredom of war is debatable. David Axe is many things, but boredom is against his nature. Buy this book; you won't be bored.

I am not usually a fan of graphic novels however I found this one gripping. Whether that is because it is a memoir or because the combination of David Axe's writing and Matt Bors's illustrations goes together so well I am not sure, it doesn't matter because this is a book I did not want to put down.

Page after page has you following David Axe from what most of us call home to one war zone and back, to arms fairs and editor's offices until another opportunity arises to head off to another part of the world to document its troubles. The more I got into this book though, the more I realise that it's not about the trouble spots he goes to but about his own and how he changes from someone who reports on wars to someone who reports on people.

Matt Bors's stark black and white illustrations are ideally suited to this world of contrasts, with a flick of the pen he can lend a wry humour to any situation or convey the sobering reality of a life and death situation. I thoroughly enjoyed this book on the first read through, I'm getting more out of it on the second and I hope you will appreciate it too.

Axe has got a thing or two many other war reporters and memoirists lack--audacity and self-irreverence. I finished it in a sitting or two, and this is coming from someone who doesn't read many graphic novels.

David Axe is truly an innovator in the genres of both war writing and graphic novels. War is Boring has all the makings of a good story, and most of all an entirely engrossing protagonist. Axe's sardonic tone is easy to follow along with, but the narrative is peppered with real humor and emotion.

I stared to read this, got bored,dejected and thought why in the world did i pick up this book. Soon I realized if reading a book about a Journalist first hand accounts of war can be so thought shifting, what it would feel really to be there in those situations seeing the blood, gore in person. This account illustrates the effects of war on ones thoughts and feelings specifically of those people who are not directly involved in these conflicts.The protagonist keeps going back to war reporting calling normal life to be boring but mostly importantly war as less boring, he keeps looking for answers as to why he is going to war reporting if its personal or he has any other motive. Its a great book if you like to read or understand Post-Traumatic Stress of wars elegantly put up as only a graphic novel can.

I went into this book thinking that it was a Joe Sacco war reporting kind of graphic novel like The Fixer and Other Stories but it turns out that David Axe is even more concerned with his personal life and the toll that war reporting takes on it than even Sacco could manage. That's not to say that it's inferior - it's a compelling narrative - but you might very well leave this book with no more insight into the conflicts in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc., etc. than you had going in.

What makes this book compelling is the fact that David Axe has a death wish that is obvious well before he depicts himself taking a picture of a man holding a gun to him and demanding identification. The epiologue where he says that he didn't die seems choked with disappointment. The most interesting parts are where he's stateside and he can't quite deal with his girlfriend, parents, etc. It's like those scenes in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) where the protagonist comes home and he can't quite deal with the fact that everyone is living in peaceful existence and talking about the war as if it's on another planet.

Fascinating stuff but I wonder if David Axe is long for this world.

"War Is Boring" is actually a great companion piece to the book "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" by Chris Hedges. This is more of a personal odyssey than an indepth analysis of the places that Axe goes to, so don't expect to learn about these warzones in this graphic novel.

The work does push you to learn more about these afflicted areas however, and that should be the first duty of any nonfiction piece. You get a pretty good feel for how it would be to be a correspondent although many day-to-day details of the drudgery are left out.

Instead, the experience is distilled down to the essential experience of being addicted to following war while also being moved by it. The art itself is very nice, better than Rall and DeLisle's travelogue treatments.

"War is Boring" could be the unofficial successor of David's first graphic novel "War Fix", drawed by Steven Olexa. The story in "War Fix" impressed me but I didn't like the drawing that much. This is different from "War is Boring": David and Matt are together a great combination. I like David's stories and Matt's drawings. The question first arose in "War Fix" is still the same: why is David that addicted to war zones? Did he choose war or was he chosen by the war? Maybe he regularly needs a kick of adrenaline, by the way a typical syndrome, also known in other jobs with extreme peaks of danger, pressure and uncertainty. Like a firefighter needs serious fires from time to time or a paramedic has to have a major disaster, David is attracted to war torn countries. It's not because he loves war, it's because in situations of deadly danger, he feels alive. An excellent expression of such a situation is displayed on front cover of his book: he is the quiet eye of the storm in the middle of a battleground. In his graphic novel he describes the thrilling experiences reporting from the middle of an ongoing war. This excitement has its price: back home he noticed the boring normality. By carefully reading this novel, you will recognize that the situation can not only be described in terms of "black or white". Most part of the time in Iraq he felt bored. In Libanon the situation was calm and back then the UNIFIL troops were more interested in easy lifestyle then in their duty. East Timor seems to have been a very depressing experience, in Afghanistan the corruption was disillusioning and to take the girlfriend to Somalia wasn't maybe the best idea. David tells us: "War is Boring", but peace is stultifying.

I would recommend "War is Boring" to all who are thinking about going to a military or civil mission abroad because David and Matt give you a good first impression about. The story shows you an inside view of a "Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was". I've already heard that when someone takes part in a dangerous mission or witnesses an assault, their personality could change. Perhabs David's story in this graphic novel will finally prove that to you.

War is Boring is an illustrated memoir taking the reader through David Axe's journeys through war-torn countries. Ted Rall puts it best in the book's introduction, writing, "Death and life, hatred and normalcy, so closely intertwined." For an outsider, this book is a fascinating look at the existentialism that surrounds war.

While reading this book, I was intrigued by the choices Axe makes, sacrificing safety for fear, and finding himself surrounded by boredom in the midst of chaos and death. It is, despite its attempts at life's pointlessness, pointed: a vision of choices and experiences being uniquely ours. It is also understated: not an attempt to sermonize, but one that leaves the bigger questions to the readers imagination. Did Axe take a position on each -- or for that matter, any -- war? This book is thoughtful not for what it says, but what it doesn't say. Does one's opinion truly matter, or are we destined to all lead almost parallel, unconnected lives?

Despite Axe's own purposeful disconnect, I highly recommend that readers connect to "War is Boring." Books that take us where we could never be -- in this case for me, Somalia and the like -- are the ones we ought to read: the ones that will expand our theories and grow our thought.