The Twenty-Fifth Hour by C. Virgil Gheorghiu

I recently finished reading The Twenty-Fifth Hour by C. Virgil Gheorghiu (as opposed to the handful of books by the same title by other authors). It had been recommended to me by Jassim, who has read it at leasts a dozen times. He said that it really describes the current situation in Iraq, even though the protagonist is a WWII era Romanian farmer, who is wrongfully imprisoned and passed from internment camp to internment camp throughout the war.

There is a review of it from TIME from 1950:

...It is the innocent helplessness of its heroes that gives The Twenty-Fifth Hour its heavy coating of irony. Men, Gheorghiu is saying, no longer think in terms of individuals or their happiness. Human life has ceased to mean anything except as a cog in some machine or pattern. Production, material results, categories, statistics—these are all that count. The criminals are not so much the Nazis and the Communists as the big-machine boys everywhere. And of all the nations in the world, says Gheorghiu, it is the U.S. that most fervently worships the twin cults of bigness and the machine. Author Gheorghiu (who steadfastly refuses to visit the U.S.) offers his novelist's proof: his heroes, sure they can count on justice from the Americans, get a heartless shake in U.S. Army P.W. camps.

Choice in Despair. Despite its European popularity, The Twenty-Fifth Hour is no literary masterpiece. Its plot is heavily propped with coincidence, the characters are undeveloped and its message is spelled out with "petitions" that bring the story to repeated full stops. Gheorghiu's villain, machine-age power, is neither an original nor a persuasive one. What gives the book its impact is its assembly of evidence of man's inhumanity to man, by no means peculiar to the machine age. ...

As stated in the TIME review, the mechanics weren't excellent, but most of the book was a compelling read and it certainly made an impact, despite the occasional sermon/manifesto-like tone interspersed throughout the narrative.