ongoing - Sun. Aug. 31

We've been reading a lot about war lately. Yes, of course, about the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the World Wars. They've been an endless source of fascination and horror (and yes heroism) for years. First learning about WWI - it had no numeral back when it started; who could imagine it'd be one of two wars Germany decided to embark upon? - we were struck with the unimaginable cruelty. The musturd gas, the air attacks, the stench, the mud and blood and guts. The very low return rate of soldiers, especially European ones. And, didn't we just hear that the last known US soldier from WWI recently died, ending, sort of a long chapter in history?

 We've always been fascinated by war posters, too, again, especially of the first World Wars, when a sense of nobility and duty was called for. Not just on the part of the grunts, but of the stay-at-home (or go-to-work) wives and mothers. There was a naivete about it all - war as a glorious adventure. And war movies did little to reject that argument. Well, "Gallipoli" did but that didn't come until more than a half-century later. It really wasn't until Vietnam - the "Living Room War" as the New Yorker TV critic Michael Arlen called it - that war became suddenly more real, more brutal. And America's reasoning for being in that war ... Not so pure, not so moral. There was the protest movement, which I joined as a young pup, feeling a kind of rush of solidarity among my college age elders. But we're getting off-track here. What we're really alerting you to is an exhibit at the Boston Public Library's Copley Square branch running July 1 - Aug. 31 called "American Posters of the First World War." It will take you back in time and make you think about motives - motives of the guys on the top - the potential winners - and how they were able to persuade the poor grunts at the bottom, where the best possible solution was to return a life and slip back into society after witnessing untold horror. Now called PTS. Check out the exhibit -more than 50 posters strong - and drift back in time ... and then think about how we're being called to the cause via those slick Marine adverts on TV right now, in the midst of two hugely unpopular wars. Food for lots of thought. Open from 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. Mon-Thurs and 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Sat. and Sun. Free.

700 Boylston St, 617-536-5400 www.bpl.org