| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 183 words from this article are provided below; about 335 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II. By James Dawes. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. x, 308 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00648-8.)

This book is a meditation on the relationship between violence and language, not only in the ways that violence impedes, corrals, or squelches speech but also in the ways the assumptions embedded in words trigger, presume, or encourage violence. James Dawes organizes this meditation historically: the book unfolds chronologically, as Dawes makes sense of postwar literature, memoir, and philosophy after the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The authors in question are an expected and unexpected mix--Stephen Crane and William Faulkner, Louisa May Alcott and Ulysses S. Grant, Francis H. Bradley and William James, yet the predominant figures here are familiar; there is a particular fascination with Ernest Hemingway (not surprising, given Dawes's topic). Dawes also weaves in some British thinkers and writers (Bradley, above, along with Virginia Woolf and others), arguing persuasively that national borders in this case are in many ways false constructs. . . .

There are about 335 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.