Looking for the Good War : American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

Looking for the Good WarAuthor(s): Elizabeth D. Samet"Essential reading. 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 Beautiful Country Burn AgainIn 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