Catch-22
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
(the lunacy of war, seen in a USAF base on a fantasy Mediterranean island during the second world war)
The Craziness of Command (you"ll laugh till you die)
Richard Hooker, M*A*S*HÂ Â (US doctors in Korea fighting insane conditions, boredom and gung-ho top brass)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Peter George, Red Alert  (chain of command follies and failures triggers World War III)
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny  (crew court-martialled for mutinying against insane World War II minesweeper captain)
Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers  (over-sexed, bewildered British conscripts in Far East)
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk  (World War I batman obeys every order, believes every lie, keeps out of trouble)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity"s Rainbow  (what is top secret World War II establishment for? What is meaning of life? Should war (and sex) not be more fun than this?)
The World Gone Mad (laugh or cry, we live in an insane asylum)
Jersey Kosinski, Being There  (lame-brain gardener taken for political guru and saint)
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?  (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum  (nazism as an insane circus-parade watched by a gleeful, baby-brained adult)
Terry Southern, Candy  (virgin innocent abroad - neither innocent nor virgin for long)
Richard Condon, Mile High  (US power politics; a farcical orgy of sex, drugs, blackmail and murder)
Andrew Sinclair, Gog  (giant from past washed up in Scotland, travels to London, horrified at 20th-century "civilisation")
War Kills Our Young Men (war at the sharp end: brutal, unglorious, and pointless)
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front  (lives of four young men disrupted and ruined by brutality of World War I trench warfare)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage  (young volunteer horrified but exhilarated by battle conditions in American Civil War)
Len Deighton, Bomber  (meticulous planning for a bombing-run over Germany in World War II)
Neville Shute, Landfall  (breakdown of young pilot who sinks "one of ours" by mistake)
Mario Vargas Llosa, The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero  (farcical tragedy of young cadets in 1950s Peruvian military academy)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead  (World War II US conscripts brutalised by conditions of service on a hopeless Pacific mission)
