Includes a New Afterword by the AuthorA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA USA Today Best Book of 2007A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2007What does it mean to teach literature to a soldier? How does it prepare a young man or woman for combat? At West Point, Elizabeth Samet reads classic and modern works of literature with America's future military elite, and in this stirring memoir she chronicles the ways in which war has transformed her relationship to the books she and her students read together. While fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Samet's former students share their thoughts on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, and the films of Bogart and Cagney. And their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Soldier's Heart is an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

A thought-provoking exploration of America''s complex relationship with war, violence, and national identity in the post-World War II era."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 PostIn Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet, a professor of English at West Point, reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II. She exposes the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans that was suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States'' "exceptional" history and destiny.Samet traces the war''s ambivalent legacy in mythologized figures such as the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the erstwhile G.I. turned cop or criminal in late-1940s pulp fiction and films, the disaffected Civil War veteran of the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero post-Vietnam. These figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and respond to assumptions about national identity affirmed by World War II.As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, it''s time to rethink our national mythology surrounding World War II and its impact on our sense of national destiny, beliefs about the use of American military force, and inability to accept the realities of recent decades of devastating conflict.

Includes a New Afterword by the AuthorA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA USA Today Best Book of 2007A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2007What does it mean to teach literature to a soldier? How does it prepare a young man or woman for combat? At West Point, Elizabeth Samet reads classic and modern works of literature with America's future military elite, and in this stirring memoir she chronicles the ways in which war has transformed her relationship to the books she and her students read together. While fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Samet's former students share their thoughts on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, and the films of Bogart and Cagney. And their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Soldier's Heart is an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

A thought-provoking exploration of America''s complex relationship with war, violence, and national identity in the post-World War II era."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 PostIn Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet, a professor of English at West Point, reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II. She exposes the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans that was suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States'' "exceptional" history and destiny.Samet traces the war''s ambivalent legacy in mythologized figures such as the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the erstwhile G.I. turned cop or criminal in late-1940s pulp fiction and films, the disaffected Civil War veteran of the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero post-Vietnam. These figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and respond to assumptions about national identity affirmed by World War II.As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, it''s time to rethink our national mythology surrounding World War II and its impact on our sense of national destiny, beliefs about the use of American military force, and inability to accept the realities of recent decades of devastating conflict.