| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Joanna Bourke. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. New York: BasicBooks. 1999. Pp. xxiii, 509. $30.00.

"The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing" (p. xiii), writes Joanna Bourke. Typical military histories, she continues, if they consider the common soldiers' lot, stress the soldiers' hardships, and camaraderie, and fear of death. "This book," she explains, "aims to put killing back into military history" (p. xiv). 1

The book is structured thematically. The first three chapters consider the tensions between imagined killing and the actual experience of battle. The next three chapters examine heroism and atrocity. Chapters seven and eight investigate the ways in which soldiers and their physicians deal with the guilt and pain associated with killing. Finally, the last three chapters focus on noncombatants' attitudes toward killing. Bourke's material comes from the experience of British, Australian, and American troops in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. . . .

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