Testament of Youth Author:Vera Brittain Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain?s elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war?s end... more » she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.« less