Plucked from the pastoral middle-class sanctuary of Pasadena, where he grew up, twenty-year-old Fussell battle in southeastern France. While recovering from serious wounds he suffered in combat, Fussell vowed never to take orders again. His book makes clear how this newly subversive sensibility came to color all his later years -- as a Harvard Ph.D. student, as a professor of literature, and as a cultural commentator and author of such abidingly relevant books as Thank God for the Atom Bomb, Class. Wartime, and The Great War and Modern Memory.
Doing Battle is at once a summing-up of one man's life and a profoundly thoughtful portrait of America's own search for identity in the second half of this century.
According to the renowned social critic and historian Paul Fussell, we are what we wear, and it doesn't look good. Uniforms parses the hidden meanings of our apparel -- from brass buttons to blue jeans, badges to feather flourishes -- revealing what our clothing says about class, sex, and our desire to belong. With keen insight and considerable curmudgeonly flair, Fussell unfolds the history and cultural significance of all manner of attire, fondly analyzing the roles that uniforms play in a number of communities -- the military, the church, health care, food service, sports -- even everyday civilian life. Uniforms is vintage Fussell: revelatory, ribald, and irresistible (Shirley Hazzard).