conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled In Flanders Fields about Grade, Up-Within, War with the genre: Children's Books, Literature & Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Grade 5 Up-Within a framework of the basic historical facts of World War I, the author's famous poem is juxtaposed with paintings and a biography of the poet. Vivid descriptions of the life of a soldier and an explanation of the powerful influence the poem had on society at the time are also included. Black-and-white sketches, photographs of the subject, and memorabilia (e.g., war posters and medals) add to the visual appeal created by Wilson's artwork. The format is somewhat confusing, combining the expository text with full- and double-page paintings captioned with lines of the poem. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful book that can be used in a number of ways because of the variety of information it contains.<BR><I>Sabrina L. Fraunfelter, Kings Glen Elementary School, Springfield, VA</I><BR>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fraunfelter, Kings Glen Elementary School, Springfield, VA</I><BR>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Vivid descriptions of the life of a soldier and an explanation of the powerful influence the poem had on society at the time are also included. Black-and-white sketches, photographs of the subject, and memorabilia (e.g., war posters and medals) add to the visual appeal created by Wilson's artwork. The format is somewhat confusing, combining the expository text with full- and double-page paintings captioned with lines of the poem. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful book that can be used in a number of ways because of the variety of information it contains.<BR><I>Sabrina L.Grade 5 Up-Within a framework of the basic historical facts of World War I, the author's famous poem is juxtaposed with paintings and a biography of the poet.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'In Flanders Fields
  And yet the general public has never been especially interested in the views of literary critics'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Flanders Fields
  And yet the general public has never been especially interested in the views of literary critics. They don't particularly care if the poem's rhyme scheme is facile or its imagery Victorian, and they're not swayed by the uses and abuses of McCrae's work after his death. The critical turn against the poem is virtually the only thing that has changed about it. In the twenty-first century, it continues to be used just as it was throughout the twentieth—recited by schoolchildren at assemblies, read solemnly to crowds at Remembrance, Memorial or Anzac Day, exploited by advertisers and bandied about on behalf of every imaginable cause. The fact that "" has long been politicized, commercialized and commodified does not compromise its powerful imagery and genuine sentiment. People continue to see it, one hopes, exactly as McCrae wrote it a century ago: as an ode to a generation who gave their best to preserve ideals that, to them, meant everything.
  Ypres, 1915. The makeshift graves of three privates from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Their remains were later moved to the Ypres Reservoir Cemetary, Belgium.
  The Canadian National Vimy Memorial, photographed by Flight Lieutenant Alex Gray in August 1944, shortly after the liberation of France. The photo was intended to show that retreating German forces had not destroyed or damaged the Monument.
  SUMMER 2005 My son, Jacob, and I bicycle along a rural Belgian road. The July sun shines and the breeze causes the fields to undulate in green and golden waves. He's just turned fifteen and has a metal detector strapped on his back. We pedal along an area called the Ypres Salient, this landscape not all that different from Southern Ontario's. Neither of us speaks French or Flemish or Dutch or German, but Jacob swooned over the waitresses in the square the evening before, who seemed to fluently speak all of these languages, and I was grateful when they didn't balk at Jacob ordering a beer.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I make my way from machine to machine, dozens and dozens of photos in each. And as the late morning turns to early afternoon, I realize that, in these incredible images, the world I'd tried so hard to bring to life finally truly comes to life in front of my eyes. And I realize the irony: sitting here in a musty room in an old house in Belgium, I am witnessing the world around me unfold in a far more real way than the actual world outside ever could. I am sitting in this musty room in Belgium, moving from machine to machine, moving from stool to stool, speed dating with the dead, the horror of a past I finally get to see in a dimension I've not ever been able to imagine before.
  I see my father, finally. I see John McCrae. I begin to see some of the scenes that those two men must have similarly seen, this utter brutality forced upon all of nature, created by man. I finally see; it's through the eyes of the people that haunt these photos, these ghosts who materialize in a world I'd only until now flatly envisioned. Wishing Jacob could be here to see these images with me, I make the decision to spend the afternoon with the photos inside this dark place rather than bicycle in the sunshine of the Ypres Salient, because here in this room the world has opened up.
  SUMMER 2015 I've been invited back by the city of Ypres this coming June to spend a month reflecting on the centennial of the Great War and sharing my thoughts with the public. I write this now in the early spring of 2015 in the hope that the summer approaching might in part be spent this way:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And then we stood there—him and his girlfriend and me—and we all looked at each other for a long time.
  I felt a lot of things: stupid, and curious about him, and scared for him, and weirdly close to him because he'd said something vulnerable. I didn't know how to get the mix of things I was thinking into words.
  Muddied and bloodied: Manitoba sappers (tunnel diggers) just back from Vimy Ridge, France, January 1917.
  Copyright © 2014 George Elliott Clarke. All rights reserved. Commissioned for an exhibition honouring Canada's military chaplains that opened at St. James Cathedral in Toronto on November 5, 2014. First print publication by permission.