A review by justabean_reads
Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness by Elizabeth D. Samet
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.5
In which a civilian literature instructor from West Point military college explains why Stephen Ambrose, the guy who coined "the greatest generation" and every president since Ronald Reagan (but especially Ronald Reagan) are wrong about World War II, and probably also the US Civil War, and often Shakespeare. Samet has a lot of feelings on these topics.
The book essentially lays out the immensely mixed feelings about WWII in the US during and after the war, the questions around the morale of the troops and why they thought they were fighting, and how they adapted on return, this last often via the lens of Noir. She then follows the slow turn into forgetting and mythologising all of that, really kicking off during Vietnam, but hitting its peak with the 50th Anniversary and books like Band of Brothers. Finally, Samet talks about how the US Civil War also got mythologised, all of the harm that did, and the general perils of looking at one war through the lens of another. She keeps getting sidetracked into Shakespeare, I think mostly because she really likes Shakespeare, and it provides a thematic comparison.
It wasn't really much I hadn't run into before (though now I want to read Studs Terkel and watch Cry Havoc (1943)), but there's a comforting hum in reading someone who generally has the same taste and opinions (she liked E.B. Sledge's and Robert Leckie's books, and Twelve O'Clock High, and seems to want to set Saving Private Ryan on fire).
The book essentially lays out the immensely mixed feelings about WWII in the US during and after the war, the questions around the morale of the troops and why they thought they were fighting, and how they adapted on return, this last often via the lens of Noir. She then follows the slow turn into forgetting and mythologising all of that, really kicking off during Vietnam, but hitting its peak with the 50th Anniversary and books like Band of Brothers. Finally, Samet talks about how the US Civil War also got mythologised, all of the harm that did, and the general perils of looking at one war through the lens of another. She keeps getting sidetracked into Shakespeare, I think mostly because she really likes Shakespeare, and it provides a thematic comparison.
It wasn't really much I hadn't run into before (though now I want to read Studs Terkel and watch Cry Havoc (1943)), but there's a comforting hum in reading someone who generally has the same taste and opinions (she liked E.B. Sledge's and Robert Leckie's books, and Twelve O'Clock High, and seems to want to set Saving Private Ryan on fire).