The Many Faces of War

by Lawrence A. Tritle (Co-Editor), Jason W. Warren (Co-Editor)

The faces of war are many, encompassing women, children, and men, soldiers and civilians. Their stories appear in history, literature, and art, from earliest times to events reported in today's newspapers. The essays comprising this volume explore the human face of war from multiple perspectives--psychology, literature, history, and law--and through the eyes of many societies and cultures--American and Iraqi, English and French, Roman and Jew. What emerges is a mosaic of war's Many Faces that reveal the human condition and its response to the most challenging of life's many experiences--the violence of War.

412 pages, Paperback

Published October 23, 2018

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Many Faces of War is a collection of essays by 21 scholars addressing the nature of warfare across human history. Only one of many books on the subject using the essay format, Tritle and Warren's volume focuses primarily on the trauma of war, from personal miseries of PTSD to the ways in which warfare fractures entire societies. Arranged in 5 sections, they cover the effects on the mind, the literature that war inspires, how individual participants memorialize their experiences, how war structures societies, and how armies adjust to changing technologies. The subjects range from the phalanx warfare of ancient Greece to today's drones. Along the way we're given a new look at captivity narratives on the American frontier, a discussion of how Rome fought asymmetric wars in Germany and Judaea, how soccer is used to oppose Israel in Gaza, and the tattoo as memorial. My favorite was the long essay on how French national strategy flowed from the power and identity of individual units wading through the moral muddle of their wars in Indochina and Algeria. Much of this materiel examines war not as imagination or interpretation but as searing memory and shows us that while war brings out every human quality it contains a lot of our wisdom, too. Many of these essays provided new perspectives I enjoyed enormously.