{"id":111,"date":"2019-03-05T14:53:30","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T14:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/?p=111"},"modified":"2019-03-05T14:53:30","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T14:53:30","slug":"the-military-memoirs-book-cover-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/2019\/03\/05\/the-military-memoirs-book-cover-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"The military memoirs book cover challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a thing that\u2019s been doing the rounds on Twitter over the past few weeks, termed variously \u2018#7days7books\u2019, or \u2018#7daybookcoverchallenge\u2019 or \u2018#7daybookcover\u2019.\u00a0 The idea is that you Tweet images of book covers over 7 consecutive days, and challenge someone else to do the same when you do so.\u00a0 You are instructed not to include any explanation or justification \u2013 just the images of book covers.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been spending more time than I should looking at what gets posted under this hashtag, because I\u2019m interested in book covers.\u00a0 This is mostly an outcome of the military memoirs work that Neil Jenkings and I have been doing over the last ten years; we ended up thinking a lot about their covers and their role in book marketing.\u00a0 When we interviewed military memoirists we asked them to explain to us why their books looked like they did.\u00a0 They had some really fascinating observations on this, and you can read our discussions of this in the chapter \u2018Why Do Military memoirs Look Like They Do?\u2019 in Bringing War to Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 If you can\u2019t get hold of a copy of the book and want to read the chapter, get in touch with me direct (rachel.woodward@newcastle.ac.uk).<\/p>\n

I was tagged in the book covers challenge by a colleague, and of course couldn\u2019t resist.\u00a0 I decided that all the covers had to be of military memoirs. \u00a0But selecting just seven was tough; I\u2019ve got 250+ military memoirs on the shelves in my office, and those are just the ones about participation in the UK armed forces and published after 1980.\u00a0 And then I found it impossible to randomly tweet images of the selected seven without wanting also to say something about why I was so drawn to these covers.\u00a0 So I felt a blog post was called for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. F.N. Clarke, Contact<\/em>, (Secker and Warburg, 1983) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    I like the dark pink, and I like the line drawing; no other military memoirs in my collection use either this colour or this style of illustration.\u00a0 I think the vehicle shown is an FV603 Saracen (I had to do a bit of web-browsing to work this out \u2013 apologies if I have this wrong), an armoured personnel carrier in use by the British Army in the 1970s.\u00a0 The singular title and a line drawing give nothing away.\u00a0 This is one of the Northern Ireland deployment memoirs.\u00a0 There are not that many of these in existence (Neil Jenkings and I have written about this here)<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 A.F.N. Clarke\u2019s account draws on his two tours of Northern Ireland with 3 PARA, to Belfast in 1973 and to Crossmaglen in 1976.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found it a useful and illuminating book for a number of reasons.\u00a0 I\u2019ve just flicked through it again, and have found inside a note-to-self from a number of years ago saying \u2018John Hockey says this was made into a BBC film\u2019. John is always a well-informed source<\/strong><\/a>, so I need to check this out.\u00a0 I did another quick web search, and I see that Contact <\/em>was re-issued in 2010 in a revised edition which includes text about injury and trauma suffered by the author that had been removed from the manuscript prior to publication of the first edition.\u00a0 So there\u2019s a story there that I\u2019ll have to look into too.\u00a0 I\u2019ve ordered a copy of the revised edition.\u00a0 It has one of Jonathan Olley\u2019s Castles of Ulster<\/em> photographs on the cover<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 a stark military landscape<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Hugh McManners, Falklands Commando<\/em> (originally published by William Kimber & Co, 1984, cover below from HarperCollins edition, 2002) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      I bought this book in 2003, when I\u2019d been doing some work on the idea on rurality and military masculinities<\/strong><\/a>, and was starting to get interested in military personnel\u2019s accounts of the spaces and places of their deployment. \u00a0I remember picking the book up in the shop, looking at the cover, and deciding to buy it on that basis. \u00a0The picture above is a scan of my copy, which has been read a number of times as you can see by the creases and the coffee stain on the cover. \u00a0The image credits in the book indicate that the photograph was taken during a specific operation (Brewer\u2019s Arms) during the Falklands War.\u00a0 Author images make for good book covers because they communicate the idea of veracity (so important to military memoirs given the number of people who will take issue with the idea of their \u2018truth\u2019).\u00a0 This image is striking; the author\u2019s face is lit by the sun, and his rifle is visible but in shadow.\u00a0 He looks cold and tired and battle-worn.\u00a0 He fixes us with his stare, and we can guess at fatigue by looking at the size of the Bergen on his back.\u00a0 The distinctive stencil font clarifies this as \u2018military\u2019, as if we hadn\u2019t already guessed \u2013 a clich\u00e9, I know, but effective nonetheless.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Andy McNab, Bravo Two Zero<\/em> (Corgi, 1994)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        \"\"<\/p>\n

        I bought this when I first started doing research on military-related things (mostly the politics of military land use) in about 1997, and I realised that I knew virtually nothing about the organisation and structures of the British Army.\u00a0 I had tried to read a few things like Charles Heyman\u2019s pocket books, but as useful as these are, they aren\u2019t exactly light reading.\u00a0 I saw Bravo Two Zero<\/em> on sale and realised I recognised the title, but knew little else about it.\u00a0 So I bought it.\u00a0 Once I started reading, I couldn\u2019t put it down.\u00a0 The book is about a Special Forces operation in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; the operation is compromised and the story unfolds around what happens to McNab and his colleagues in the aftermath.\u00a0 It\u2019s an action-adventure memoir that\u2019s still worth reading; the fact that it sold about 1.5 million copies is indicative. As for the cover, there are several significant features:\u00a0 the use of fire, indicating destruction, chaos and rebirth; the use of McNab\u2019s post-nominals to signal his credibility and achievements as a soldier; the use of the SAS winged dagger, ever-present on the covers Special Forces books to indicate its potential appeal to a particular market segment (read John Newsinger\u2019s Dangerous Men<\/em><\/strong><\/a> for a full account). Bravo Two Zero<\/em>, famously, has its detractors, and there are a number of interesting stories about the afterlives of this book and its cultural effects.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got a more recent edition of Bravo Two Zero<\/em> with an updated cover using more contemporary military memoir design features (armed men in silhouette, visible rifles, a helicopter, use of muted sandy colours).\u00a0 These are common in memoirs from the 2000s, from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the re-designed cover was produced presumably to introduce the book to a new readership.\u00a0 But I have a fondness for the original \u2013 the use of fire and the winged dagger are repeated on the covers of many Special Forces memoirs, but this one\u2019s The Daddy.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Sarah Ford, One Up <\/em>(HarperCollins, 1997) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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          Military memoirs written by women are fairly rare \u2013 at the last count I had ten by women in my collection of 250+.\u00a0 This is because of the smaller number of women having a military experience to write about (even in 2019, only 10.4% of the UK\u2019s armed forces are women), and because of publishers\u2019 primary interests in specific types of narratives relating to direct combat roles, roles from which women were excluded until very recently.\u00a0 The military memoirs written by women have tended to be about women in exceptional roles \u2013 although across this small collection, they accord in the main with the conventions of the genre as a whole (Claire Duncanson, Neil Jenkings and I have written a chapter about gender and military memoirs here<\/a>)<\/strong>.\u00a0 I like this cover because it shows, simply, a woman dressed for her job.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing sexualized about the image either (unlike the covers of some other memoirs by women).\u00a0 The book itself is well worth reading; it\u2019s Ford\u2019s account of her military life which included attachment to Special Forces in Northern Ireland, and it\u2019s one I\u2019ve used a lot when trying to think about both gender issues in the military, and things like the movement of personnel through spaces of deployment (she is deployed because, being a woman, she has access to spaces and access to modes of intelligence gathering not available to men).\u00a0\u00a0 And the implications of familiarity in the endorsement is also interesting (McNab is a serial endorser of military memoirs, and there\u2019s something to be written about that too, another time).<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Monty Woolley, Cleanse their Souls<\/em> (Pen & Sword, 2004) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            \"\"<\/p>\n

            This is a memoir of peacekeeping in Bosnia; the author was a Lieutenant with the Cheshire Regiment battlegroup deployed in 1992-93, and the story centres around his witnessing of atrocities.\u00a0 The image show what looks like a displaced family; there is rubble in the background and the sense that it is a cold winter day.\u00a0 The abjection of the family is notable, and the hand of the man front and centre in the image is blurred, as if he\u2019s gesturing to someone off camera.\u00a0 There\u2019s no photo credit (that I can find, anyway) in the book, and I\u2019ve wondered a number of times whether this is one taken by the author, or whether the author is one of the two soldiers shown. \u00a0It is a striking image because military memoirs rarely have covers showing civilians caught up in war. Catherine Baker<\/strong><\/a> has written a number of interesting papers on the experiences of British military personnel in Bosnia, and her work explores issues of language, translation and communication, and the difficulties and politics of this in the British deployments to Bosnia. This book captures something of those issues, I think.<\/p>\n

             <\/p>\n

              \n
            1. Dan Mills, Sniper One (Penguin, 2008)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              \"\"<\/p>\n

              This is such a great example of contemporary military memoir cover design that I had to include it.\u00a0 It has everything: the stencil effect typeface for the title (and when you hold the book in your hand you appreciated that the title is slightly embossed on the card of the cover); the cross hairs around the letter O; the use of sandy-camouflage design in the background; the palm trees to indicate a vague sense of location; the inclusion of a very visible weapon (which I assume to be a sniper rifle); and images of three figures which look like they could have been superimposed on each other from three different original sources.\u00a0 We see another Andy McNab endorsement, the idea that this is a popular book selling in high volumes, and the sub-heading indicates very clearly what kind of account this is likely to be.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen a more recent edition with \u2018The book they tried to ban\u2019 included on the cover, and this will always help with sales (though I\u2019m not sure, and must check up on, the reasons for this).\u00a0 This cover was really helpful to Neil and I when we wrote a piece on military masculinities and public narratives of war, available here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n

                \n
              1. Pen Farthing, One Dog at a Time <\/em>(Ebury, 2009) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                \"\"<\/p>\n

                I like showing an image of this cover when I give lectures or talks about military memoirs. \u00a0I put the image up on screen, look out at the audience, and watch as they go \u2018awwwww\u2019 and start to smile.\u00a0 Puppies.\u00a0 What\u2019s not to like?\u00a0 It\u2019s also a really interesting example to think about when trying to determine the parameters of the military memoirs genre. \u00a0Neil and I have always worked within the definition of a book as a military memoir if it is written as a first-person, non-fiction account of deployment by a military operative in some kind of military context (which needn\u2019t necessarily include armed conflict).\u00a0 So according to this definition, we include it as a military memoir, because it is about the activities of the author and colleagues on a tour in Afghanistan in 2009.\u00a0 But the author and publisher categorise it within the genre of true-life animal stories, and booksellers position it there on the shelves of their shops, rather than in the military history section where military memoirs are usually found.\u00a0 The author\u2019s comment when we interviewed him was that it was a kind of \u2018Marley and Me<\/em> \u2013 with guns\u2019.\u00a0 Because although it\u2019s a deployment story, the narrative focuses on the activities of Farthing and colleagues in rescuing stray dogs.\u00a0 When the author returned to the UK, he set up the Nowzad charity<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0which works for animal welfare in Afghanistan \u2013 activities like vet training, animal neutering, anti-rabies programmes and the like.\u00a0 What seems to me to be significant about this book \u2013 and the cover is crucial in this \u2013 is that it works as a mechanism for telling people who wouldn\u2019t necessarily have kept up with news media reporting, about the activities of British forces in Helmand in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Many people who wouldn\u2019t have access to information about the experience of those deployments would learn something about them through reading about dog rescue.\u00a0 I won\u2019t go into the politics of representations of the Afghanistan war (Neil and I have written about that here<\/strong><\/a>), and I don\u2019t want to suggest that the dominant narrative should be one of dog rescue.\u00a0 But in talking about dog rescue, the author managed to reach a readership that other military memoirs wouldn\u2019t, and that has to be a useful thing.<\/p>\n

                 <\/p>\n

                Rachel Woodward<\/em><\/p>\n

                 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                There\u2019s a thing that\u2019s been doing the rounds on Twitter over the past few weeks, termed variously \u2018#7days7books\u2019, or \u2018#7daybookcoverchallenge\u2019 or \u2018#7daybookcover\u2019.\u00a0 The idea is that you Tweet images of book covers over 7 consecutive days, and challenge someone else to do the same when you do so.\u00a0 You are instructed not to include any … Continue reading The military memoirs book cover challenge<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7655,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[10,31],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-military-geography","tag-military-memoirs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7655"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/militaryresearchatnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}