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Title: An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare by Joanna Bourke ISBN: 0-465-00738-4 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Despite Footnotes, Bourke does not know Sources
Comment: The depressing thing about this book is that it *could* have been good. Interesting, in a morbid sort of way, Bourke attempts to demonstrate that war is about killing. Despite the "well DUH" factor that entails, there is potential in this approach. Unfortunately, Bourke is not a military historian, and as a result has no clue about the sources she uses.
The most egregious examples of course, have to do with the numerous fakes (fake combat veterans that is) she cites. Since she did practically zero primary source research for this book (at least that is the impression one gets from her footnotes) all she has really done here is assembled other people's writings. She did not know the field well enough to know that many of her sources for American behavior in Vietnam were not who they said they were in various other books written by non-historians. Most glaringly are the citations of Woodley and Kirkland, both African Americans that claimed to have committed atrocities, both in Special Forces or Long Range Recon(if you believe their accounts in Wallace Terry's book _Bloods_), but the reality was that one was a supply clerk and the other was a truck driver. Similar problems exist with fully 1/5 of the accounts Bourke uses on Americans in Vietnam, a depressing demonstration of the lack of rigor in today's modern academic history.
Adding insult to injury, despite the fact that she acknowledges that one of her central conceptual sources (I stopped counting at 50 citations of this one source), SLA Marshall, "had problems" she continues to use his material throughout. Marshall's problem was that he made his statistics UP! How can one cite a man who's been proven a liar, and a fraud? I don't get it.
Finally, there are the problems when Bourke cites novels as though they are historical sources. I recognized at least two novels in her bibliography, so I went back and checked the notes...yep, she cites Anton Myrer's _Once An Eagle_ (a great novel, but a novel none the less)as though it were a memoir. There may be more than two cited, I am only familiar with the American novels. For all I know half her English "sources" might be novels too.
As I said, this is depressing because the subject matter *is* important, and potentially useful. Oh well.
Rating: 4
Summary: An Intimate History of Killing
Comment: Historians and social scientists should read this book, even though it tends to be rambling and repetitious. History is influenced by the outcome of battles. The outcome of battle is influenced by the mental state of the combatants. This book sheds light on important questions: How could young men, the products of our enlightened civilization, behave as they did at My Lai? And the chaplain bless them? Should civilians fear veteran killers when they return home?
Joanna Bourke has assembled a mass of English-language material (there are 144 pages of notes) about British, American, and Australian men in battle in the current century: WW-1, WW-2, Viet Nam. She also deals with training methods, the role of military chaplains, and responses of civilians to the war. She reports that often men feel they are acting out a script, as in a John Wayne movie, and killing is what they are supposed to do. Most soldiers enjoy killing; it's a high, like dope or sex. Afterward, soldiers must deal with guilt, denial, or acceptance. There are remakable similarities (eg. bayonet practice to develop a killer spirit) between the three wars she discusses, but the Viet Nam war was particularly screwed up -- at My Lai, they raped the women, then shot them -- as a result of poor civilian leadership.
Rating: 5
Summary: Insightful and thought-provoking (despite unfair criticisms)
Comment: Bourke has written an intriguing and wonderful book which asks difficult questions and demands that we confront uncomfortable truths. This flies in the face of the Stephen Ambrose groupies who want glorious bands of brothers who grit their teeth and buckle down to unpleasant chores. Rather Bourke, a tremendously erudite historian, shows the complexity of the reaction of Western soldiers to killing.
Like Klaus Theweleit's MALE FANTASIES and Christopher Browning's ORDINARY MEN, Bourke's book must be taken seriously and forces any thoughtful reader to question their own possible reaction in extraordinary circumstances. This self-analysis is automatic when reading this work and undobtedly, many people don't want their neat fantasies disturbed by inconvenient reality.
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Title: On Killing by Dave Grossman ISBN: 0316330116 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Acts of War: Behavior of Men in Battle by Richard Holmes ISBN: 0029148510 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 04 August, 1989 List Price(USD): $20.50 |
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Title: Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command by S. L. A. Marshall ISBN: 0806132809 Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Face of Battle by John Keegan ISBN: 0140048979 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: July, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Penguin History) by Alistair Horne ISBN: 0140170413 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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