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hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 59
59. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, 1995.
It has to be at least three years, if not more, since I bought this book, and it's been sitting on my shelves ever since. (Right beside The Fall of France, in fact, which has been there even longer.) But I'm finally starting to work my way through my non-fiction TBR pile faster than I can replace them (abetted, of course, by my present lack of income), and its number was up.
It's an interesting book and, concerning the mechanics of killing/not killing in combat and the variety of responses thereto, remarkably illuminating. When Grossman diverges from research into polemic, however, I feel rather like shaking him: a number of his assertions strike me as dubious, particularly as concerning male role models, the necessity thereof for boys.
It is also a very local, indeed, in many ways almost parochial book: it is very much wholly concerned with the American military and American society, and might, perhaps, lose something thereby.
At least for those of us who don't start from an assumption of American centrality. I had the sense that Grossman might be a little too close to his subject to do it the kind of justice that this book potentially embodies. Which might mean that I wasn't reading the book I wanted to read instead: that happens, too.
I have a cold, which is annoying and slightly hideous and the main reason I'm catching up on my unread bookshelves rather than doing anything more productive. And soon I will go downstairs and play Dragon Age Origins and kill monsters in a therapeutic fashion from under my blanket.
*cough*
*sneeze*
*whimper*
59. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, 1995.
It has to be at least three years, if not more, since I bought this book, and it's been sitting on my shelves ever since. (Right beside The Fall of France, in fact, which has been there even longer.) But I'm finally starting to work my way through my non-fiction TBR pile faster than I can replace them (abetted, of course, by my present lack of income), and its number was up.
It's an interesting book and, concerning the mechanics of killing/not killing in combat and the variety of responses thereto, remarkably illuminating. When Grossman diverges from research into polemic, however, I feel rather like shaking him: a number of his assertions strike me as dubious, particularly as concerning male role models, the necessity thereof for boys.
It is also a very local, indeed, in many ways almost parochial book: it is very much wholly concerned with the American military and American society, and might, perhaps, lose something thereby.
At least for those of us who don't start from an assumption of American centrality. I had the sense that Grossman might be a little too close to his subject to do it the kind of justice that this book potentially embodies. Which might mean that I wasn't reading the book I wanted to read instead: that happens, too.
I have a cold, which is annoying and slightly hideous and the main reason I'm catching up on my unread bookshelves rather than doing anything more productive. And soon I will go downstairs and play Dragon Age Origins and kill monsters in a therapeutic fashion from under my blanket.
*cough*
*sneeze*
*whimper*
