Review by Choice Review
Some books are ahead of their time; others are beyond their time. This book is right on time. After 50 years of defeats and stalemates in unconventional wars, Americans yearn for a real war--a war with trenches defining the battle lines, with Hitlerian and Churchillian protagonists committed to winning, and one that produces a generation of heroes--such as WW II. Samet (English, United States Military Academy) argues, however, that that version of WW II is a myth. The trenches are bootlegged into memory from WW I, and the good guy--bad guy framing oversimplifies what WW II was really about. Not all Americans were onboard with the war effort, and, upon greater scrutiny, the Greatest Generation was anything but. The WW II myth, says Samet, is "a dangerous lodestone in American culture," a careful-what-you-wish-for caveat on US flirtation with a WW II--esque war in Ukraine. Film buffs will appreciate her claims that WW II veterans inspired Hollywood's film noir genre and that the postwar popularity of Westerns helped displace the memories of wars in Europe and the Pacific with more-traditional American narratives. The author's long digressions into Shakespearean classics will tax readers' patience, and with no index or footnotes/endnotes, her book will frustrate scholars. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. --Jerry L Lembcke, emeritus, College of the Holy Cross
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The popular perception of WWII as the "Good War" hides a darker reality, according to this iconoclastic study by West Point English professor Samet (No Man's Land). Challenging rose-colored takes on the war as the triumph of the democratic common man over fascist tyranny, Samet argues that America's war was a morass of indiscriminate carnage fought by draftees with little ideological motivation--and, in the case of Black soldiers facing racial discrimination, deep ambivalence--amid considerable public disaffection on the home front. Worse, she contends, the retrospective veneration of the war as "a testament to the redemptive capacity of American violence" justified misbegotten military adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. Concentrating more on critical theory than politics or history, Samet probes interpretations of war in literary and cultural works from Shakespeare's Henry V to 20th-century war novels, Saving Private Ryan, and film noir's jaundiced view of an America coarsened and corrupted by the conflict and the troubled veterans returning from it. Samet's analysis is sometimes incisive but more often rambles through age-old indictments of the glorification of war. Ultimately, this intriguing provocation is too broad and unfocused to reveal much about why America keeps going into battle. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In her latest book, Samet (English, West Point; No Man's Land) argues that many of the myths about the Second World War, especially the notion of the "greatest generation," have a negative influence on the American psyche. Indeed, she makes a compelling case that nostalgia for the war serves to promulgate an image of a national golden age to which those experiencing doubt about American exceptionalism "can always retreat." Utilizing a variety of primary sources, Samet effectively demonstrates that this nostalgia has permeated popular culture throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. She makes the intriguing assertion that there is a direct link between World War II propaganda and the U.S. Civil War; for example, she writes that imagery of Abraham Lincoln was more often used in WWII propaganda than images of George Washington--an interesting point for discussion. Her contention about the connection between World War II and the Civil War in the popular consciousness, however, seems informed more by current conversations surrounding collective memory. VERDICT A thought-provoking, thoroughly researched work that asks readers to reconsider World War II mythology. Samet's analysis, solidly based in pop culture, will be welcomed in public library collections and will appeal to readers of military history.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Samet investigates a vital question: "Has the prevailing memory of the 'Good War,' shaped…by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good?" The author, a professor of English at West Point, engages in a simultaneously deep and wide exploration of the way the meaning and memory of World War II have shaped American identity, its sense of standing in the world, and narratives of other wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, "and, retrospectively, the Civil War." Drawing on a vast number of sources, including histories; firsthand accounts in letters, memoirs, and reportage; fiction; movies (produced during and after the war); comic books; and the Army's guidebooks for soldiers, Samet smoothly distills the myths Americans have told themselves to justify the epithet of the "Good War" for a noble battle to liberate the world from fascism. That self-righteous myth, Samet asserts, "appeals to our national vanity, confirms the New World's superiority to the Old, and validates modernity and the machine." The experience of the war was marked by disillusion and confusion in the battlefield and on the homefront. The author underscores the ambivalence that pervaded the nation. Even as reports circulated about Nazi atrocities, most Americans were indifferent. The Pacific war, writes Samet, was "complicated by bitter racism" against the Japanese, while postwar novels and films "exhibit [the] confusion, discontent, and disaffection" felt by many returning soldiers. Furthermore, violence became not just associated with battle, but "an end in and of itself." For example, "in the absence of a foreign enemy against whom to deploy their violence, comic books moved in the direction of brutality and horror." Violence remains a lasting legacy of the war, leading Americans "repeatedly to imagine that the use of force can accomplish miraculous political ends even when we have the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to tell us otherwise." Not just timely, Samet's work is incisively argued and revelatory in its criticism. A cogent analysis of the cultural realities of war. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
