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

Written by Elizabeth D. Samet

Narrated by 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666142563

Elizabeth D. Samet

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America; Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times; and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. Samet is the editor of Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and World War II Memoirs: Pacific Theater. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the research and writing of Looking for the Good War. She is a professor of English at West Point.

Reviews for Looking for the Good War

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

File under: Somehow, I expected more. Samet is at her best eviscerating assorted American expressions of toxic sentimentality, such as the notion of the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War II, or the related "Lost Cause" mentality of the defeated Confederacy, because making up fairy tales is so much easier than taking a hard look at the abyss into which your government's bad political decisions led you, or, maybe, contemplating the continuing failures of American society in so many areas. As an instructor of cadets at West Point Samet takes her role as being an agent of reality very seriously. Less good are the portions of the book dealing with how post-1945 American military adventures get interpreted through the lens of the WWII experience, particularly Korea and Vietnam. Also, there's Samet's excursion into film history which felt like it should be part of another book.

[unlikely_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some interesting insights, but largely book and film synopses