“A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.
This eloquent, far-ranging analysis of the national psyche goes as far as any book I’ve ever read toward explaining the peculiar American yen for war and more war.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and ...
With this volume Terkel expanded his scope to the global and the historical, and the result is a masterpiece of oral history. “Tremendously compelling, somehow dramatic and intimate at the same time, as if one has stumbled on private ...
Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.
The “Good War” in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United ...
Once sidelined from public memory, World War II is now a historical touchstone in China. Rana Mitter links reassessment of the war to China's rising nationalism.
Like them, he seeks to find the real reasons for the actions of great powers and great leaders. Familiar Second World War figures from Adolf Hitler to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin are portrayed in a new light in this book.
In The Good War, acclaimed author and war correspondent Jack Fairweather goes beyond the battlefield to explore the righteous intentions and stunning hubris that brought the United States and its allies to the verge of defeat in this far ...
Subsequently the book considers the impact of the war on American foreign policy in the years that followed.
From letters, diaries, and memoirs, Susan Carruthers chronicles the intimate thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women whose difficult mission was to rebuild nations they had recently worked to destroy.
In Waging a Good War, bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today.