War! What Is It Good For? PDF Download

Author: Ian Morris
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374286000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Introduction: Friend to the undertaker. - The wasteland? : war and peace in ancient Rome. - The barbarians strike back : the counterproductive way of war, A.D. 1-1415. - The five hundred years' war : Europe (almost) conquers the world, 1415-1914. - Storm of steel : the war for Europe, 1914-1980s. - Red in tooth and claw : why the chimps of Gombe went to war. - The last best hope of Earth : American empire, 1989-?

Author: Kimberley Phillips Boehm
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807869086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.

Author: Benjamin Ginsberg
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616149515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Although war is terrible and brutal, history shows that it has been a great driver of human progress. So argues political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg in this incisive, well-researched study of the benefits to civilization derived from armed conflict. Ginsberg makes a convincing case that war selects for and promotes certain features of societies that are generally held to represent progress. These include rationality, technological and economic development, and liberal forms of government. Contrary to common perceptions that war is the height of irrationality, Ginsberg persuasively demonstrates that in fact it is the ultimate test of rationality. He points out that those societies best able to assess threats from enemies rationally and objectively are usually the survivors of warfare. History also clearly reveals the technological benefits that result from war—ranging from the sundial to nuclear power. And in regard to economics, preparation for war often spurs on economic development; by the same token, nations with economic clout in peacetime usually have a huge advantage in times of war. Finally, war and the threat of war have encouraged governments to become more congenial to the needs and wants of their citizens because of the increasing reliance of governments on their citizens’ full cooperation in times of war. However deplorable the realities of war are, the many fascinating examples and astute analysis in this thought-provoking book will make readers reconsider the unmistakable connection between war and progress.

Author: Elizabeth D. Samet
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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“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 Post 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 G.I. 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. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060753854
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
Though War is Old It has not Become wise. Poet and activist Alice Walker personifies the power and wanton devastation of war in this evocative poem. Stefano Vitale’s compelling paintings illustrate this unflinching look at war’s destructive nature and unforeseen consequences.

Author: James Hillman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667109
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
War is a timeless force in the human imagination—and, indeed, in daily life. Engaged in the activity of destruction, its soldiers and its victims discover a paradoxical yet profound sense of existing, of being human. In A Terrible Love of War, James Hillman, one of today’s most respected psychologists, undertakes a groundbreaking examination of the essence of war, its psychological origins and inhuman behaviors. Utilizing reports from many fronts and times, letters from combatants, analyses by military authorities, classic myths, and writings from great thinkers, including Twain, Tolstoy, Kant, Arendt, Foucault, and Levinas, Hillman’s broad sweep and detailed research bring a fundamentally new understanding to humanity’s simultaneous attraction and aversion to war. This is a compelling, necessary book in a violent world.

Author: Karl Marlantes
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802195148
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic). In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better prepare young soldiers for war. In the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature—which also helped bring them home. While contemplating ancient works from Homer to the Mahabharata, Marlantes writes of the daily contradictions modern warriors are subject to, of being haunted by the face of a young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters, and of how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. Through it all, he demonstrates just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey. In this memoir, the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn offers “a well-crafted and forcefully argued work that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche” (The Washington Post).

Author: Lewis Sorley
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547417454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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“A comprehensive and long-overdue examination of the immediate post–Tet offensive years [from a] first-rate historian.” —The New York Times Book Review Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing from thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and still classified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels of the American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these final years. Through his exclusive access to authoritative materials, award-winning historian Lewis Sorley highlights the dramatic differences in conception, conduct, and—at least for a time—results between the early and later years of the war. Among his most important findings is that while the war was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress, the soldiers were winning on the ground. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better War sheds new light on the Vietnam War.

Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
General George S. Patton famously said, "Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so!" Though Patton was a notoriously single-minded general, it is nonetheless a sad fact that war gives meaning to many lives, a fact with which we have become familiar now that America is once again engaged in a military conflict. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us purpose, resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. Chris Hedges of The New York Times has seen war up close -- in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America -- and he has been troubled by what he has seen: friends, enemies, colleagues, and strangers intoxicated and even addicted to war's heady brew. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he tackles the ugly truths about humanity's love affair with war, offering a sophisticated, nuanced, intelligent meditation on the subject that is also gritty, powerful, and unforgettable.

Author: Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101637803
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
* Newbery Honor Book * #1 New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award * Forbes 25 Top Historical Fiction Books Of All Time selection * Wall Street Journal Best Children's Books of the Year selection * New York Public Library's 100 Books for Reading and Sharing selection An exceptionally moving story of triumph against all odds set during World War II, from the acclaimed author of Fighting Words, and for fans of Fish in a Tree and Number the Stars. Ten-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him. So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan—and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime? Or will Ada and her brother fall back into the cruel hands of their mother? This masterful work of historical fiction is equal parts adventure and a moving tale of family and identity—a classic in the making. "Achingly lovely...Nuanced and emotionally acute."—The Wall Street Journal "Unforgettable...unflinching."—Common Sense Media "Touching...Emotionally charged." —Forbes ★ “Brisk and honest...Cause for celebration.” —Kirkus, starred review ★ "Poignant."—Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "Powerful."—The Horn Book, starred review "Affecting."—Booklist "Emotionally satisfying...[A] page-turner."—BCCB “Exquisitely written...Heart-lifting.” —SLJ "Astounding...This book is remarkable."—Karen Cushman, author The Midwife's Apprentice "Beautifully told."—Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall "I read this novel in two big gulps."—Gary D. Schmidt, author of Okay for Now "I love Ada's bold heart...Her story's riveting."—Sheila Turnage, author of Three Times Lucky