A remarkable achievement. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet offers readers a profound, eloquent, and haunting reflection on the relationship between war and American culture.

Andrew Bacevich, Boston University

For all of us drugged by American war culture, this book comes as a Prince Charming to awaken us from our treacherous fantasies. Dr. Monnet’s dissection of the genre conventions that control our emotional responses to war stories is stunningly brilliant. Her exploration of how the conventions of melodrama and horror fiction now tend to undermine the intentions of many would-be antiwar works is truly eye-opening. The book has made me rethink many works I thought I understood well, and it would be a treasure chest for a variety of courses. Anyone seeking to free us from our culture of war must read this invaluable volume.

H. Bruce Franklin, professor emeritus, Rutgers University; author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

It was said that the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady changed America forever by laying the battlefield dead at the people’s doorsteps. In her unflinching study, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet shows how the battlefield victims of America’s “war culture” have increasingly dominated the imagery of literature and film since the end of the Second World War—to a degree that Brady’s contemporaries could scarcely have imagined. Theoretically informed, richly illustrated, and driven as much by a hatred of war as by the awareness of its perverse seduction, this book magisterially builds upon the insights of Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration through Violence.

Will Kaufman, author of The Civil War in American Culture and American Culture in the 1970s

This book is mightily impressive. Its core – an examination of the role of the idea of war in post-WWII American culture, and an associated racially- and sexually-charged thirst for killing (and sometimes self-sacrificially dying) – is carried through with verve, and enlightenment. It makes real new contributions to our understanding of popular genres such as ‘adventure’ and ‘romance’, and does it through beautifully crafted case-studies. These include the battle for Iwo Jima (from the myths around the battle, through the famous Rosenthal photograph, to the several film versions); the narratives of the Green Berets (from novels, to song, to movie); and a series of books and films post-Vietnam war. The combination of sophisticated thinking (grounded in sharply-considered reading) and close analytic study makes this an exceptional contribution to our thinking about the constructed meanings of war.

Martin Barker, author of A 'Toxic Genre': the Iraq War Films

In this deeply empathetic study of the meanings and significance of American battle field deaths, Professor Agnieszka Soltysik manages, in one sustained effort, to resuscitate – so to speak – America’s soldiers fallen in combat and to spare them the fate of willful oblivion, as just so many body bags surreptitiously brought home. She explores the ingredients that help the survivors to redeem the fallen and to rededicate their remains to a higher purpose to inspire the nation.

Rob Kroes, Professor of American Studies Emeritus, University of Amsterdam

We now live and die amid perpetual warfare, the violence of which has been brought home in countless ways. Our foreign policies, backed up by the world’s largest military and politicians on all sides, have reaped a terrible harvest. So has American culture, which since World War II has portrayed our foreign ventures in melodramatic, adventurous, even tantalizingly gothic ways to convince us that war is an answer, combat death glorious, and flags worth saving. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet reveals the lies of such propaganda and offers solutions in our critical understanding of how war damages both our souls and our bodies.

John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California