| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

William Ian Miller. The Mystery of Courage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 346. $29.95.

This very intelligent and highly readable book offers a "meditation" on Western ideas about courage. William Ian Miller is a professor of law with a background in literature who has already demonstrated a flair for subtle interpretative analysis in previous works on disgust and humiliation. In the present work, he exhibits a great knack for asking probing questions about our claims to be able to give a coherent account of courage or to produce reliable knowledge about its nature and psychology. What interests him is the "mystery" of courage (and its opposite, cowardice, about which he has many valuable things to say). By this he means the difficulty writers have had in establishing a unitary psychology or concept of bravery that is adequate to all occasions and examples. Displaying a mastery of a wide range of texts and materials—for instance, in brilliant chapters on Aristodemus, who disgraced himself by refusing to fight in the battle of Thermopylae, Tim O'Brien's writings on the Vietnam War, and Aristotle's theory of courage, to name those that especially impressed me—Miller demonstrates that every turn the nature of courage has eluded attempts to control and define it. . . .

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