| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. By Jennifer C. James. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xii, 324 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3116-8. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5807-3.)

The black body in war resonates for African American writers with a special legacy of sacrifice, violence, and abject waste. Jennifer C. James boldly charts out a field by examining disparate works such as William Wells Brown's Clotelle (1864); Paul Laurence Dunbar's little-known novel The Fanatics (1901); Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902); Gwendolyn Brooks's war poetry and her novel, Maud Martha (1953); and what James describes as the military neoslave novel written by John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963). She frames these works and others in terms of the particularly fraught notions of national and sectarian violence enacted by, upon, and in uneasy cooperation with individuals not always considered invested in national and sectarian identities in the same way as other Americans.

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