
Looking for the Good War
American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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 GI 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.
©2021 Elizabeth D. Samet (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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Every Hawkish Person Should Listen to This Book
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Richard J. Burke
Madison, Connecticut and Marco Island, Florida
Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.
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Interesting revisionist discussion of WWII, society and memory
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Truth of war becomes distorted by memory, and human bias that is memorialized by the visual arts and literature. The support for Samet's view of war is in art and media representations of its history. From Picasso's Guernica that illustrates the real horror of war to movies like Sands of Iwo Jima, war's reality is distorted. Art and literature tell different truths. Samet is arguing no war is a good war because war is inherently bad for the mental and physical existence of human life. She argues narratives of America's Civil War are prime examples of the distortion of truth about a "...Good War..." in the same sense as Brokaw's WWII narrative. Samet coldly notes America's idealization of rebel opposition to union and civil rights falls into the same category as the idealization of America's role in WWII. Just as America did not save the world for democracy in WWII, America's Civil War did not erase institutional racism. Racism hardened after America's civil war and continues to this day.
As seen in Ukraine, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Sudan--wars continue to roil the world. War is only a destroyer, not a builder of society. Samet implies the truth of war will continue to be distorted by both victors and losers who tell the tale.
WARS TRUTH
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