I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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I adored this book. Non-fiction accounts of medical research as a page-turner? Yes, please! Oshinsky masterfully discusses polio in its medical, political, and social context. I found the history of March of Dimes fascinating-- I had no idea about Basil O'Conner and his reasons for pursing polio (or that he was drafted into the cause sort of against his will). Their use of PR techniques for medical advocacy was fascinating and clearly set the blueprint for much medical funding today. Also, I had no idea about the rivalry between Sabine and Salk or just how much of a scientific-outsider Salk really was. Finally, I was glad to see that Oshinsky discussed how polio impacted different communities (e.g. racial groups and income levels) before and after the introduction of the vaccine. The shift of polio from a middle-class to "inner-city" disease, and the corresponding loss of interest and funding, also has parallels today.
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This book poses many more questions than it answers-- but in this case, that is a good thing. I do not think anyone knows how to make war "tolerable" and Dr. Squier Kraft's perspective is illuminating. It is not easy to read, tears filled my eyes more than once. However, it is worth picking up for anyone interested in war, mental health, or PTSD.
After reading Rule Number Two I revisited the idea of "triage." Mirriam Webster's Dictionary defines triage as, "the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors" (emphasis added). Although that word only shows up twice in this book, it seems like an appropriate way to think about battlefield clinical practice and as a metaphor for understanding institutional priorities.
Triage as practice and metaphor does not qualify "surviving"-- in this framework, it is more of an all-or-nothing state. Traumatic brain injuries and PTSD problematize "survival"; suddenly quality of life becomes a much more urgent question and one that is incredibly difficult emotionally, ethically, and legally to understand. Battlefield medicine is getting much better at absolute survival (e.g. lowering numbers of KIA or DOW) but has yet to catch up to the less absolute forms of survival.
I think it is worth noting that Dr. Squier Kraft's memoir tells the story of mental health in Iraq. Her story is fascinating on several levels, but ultimately her job was to figure out who needed to go home, who needed basic treatment, and who needed a chance to cry. In fact, she acknowledges that, "In a normal situation, I would have time to work with [a patient] and and help her move toward the appropriate treatment. Out here, I knew only one thing: she needed to go home"(118). In a sense, the mental health care available in Iraq amounted to triage. Had Squier Kraft's story continued to the US' VA system, we might have learned more about the full spectrum (or lack thereof) of care available to members of the USMC. As it stands, her account suggests the ways in which her practice became about maximizing "survivors"-- and for mental health, "surviving" seems to be about returning to the unit.
Finally, four mental health professionals served 10,000 Marines in western Iraq (3). No wonder their job boiled down to basic triage. If we assume that the military saw front-line mental health only as the most basic level of triage, this makes some degree of sense. In a war zone, I completely understand why you might prioritize surgeons and nurses over "shrinks." However, if the goal is to ensure a more holistic survival, the military has radically underestimated the need. On one hand, I do not fault the military for emphasizing absolute survival over the more nuanced quality-of-life interpretation of "survival." On the other, is there a similar kind of "golden hour" (or week/month) for mental health? Could better front-line mental health interventions prevent/lessen PTSD?
The Good Soldiers, David Finkel’s 2009 account of the 2-16’s eighteen months in eastern Baghdad, provides a profound meditation on the multifaceted reality of war and its costs. Finkel outlines four distinct realities of the war in Iraq: conversations and meetings with Iraqi civilians; uneasy coordination between the US, Iraqi military, and national police; firefights, IEDs, or EFPs; and politics or PR. He also acknowledges that for wives, girlfriends, and family members there is yet a fifth war, characterized by waiting for phone calls, single parenting, resentment, and the emotional and physical demands of a returning soldier. Finkel is careful to avoid explicitly judging one experience of war as somehow more valid or “real” than the others. Implicitly, however, it is clear that his sympathies like with the soldiers’ experience of war.
In order to gain access to the 2-16, Finkel promised that his book would not be political or judge the relative success or failure of “the surge.” He is true to his word but The Good Soldiers is not a work of “objective” journalism and is inherently political. Finkel sets up George Bush’s perceptions of the war as an ironic foil for each chapter. Despite telling an Australian audience that it was an attempt to contrast the realities, it is hard to read The Good Soldiers and not feel that Bush was completely out of touch with the war’s reality. This did not bother me so much (I suspect that Finkel and I share similar politics) as his refusal to be transparent about it. The issues, beliefs, and values that motivate his desire to go to Iraq, embed in east Baghdad instead of the Green Zone, and visit Army medical centers are worth exploring�"both in terms of his narrative credibility and because they are issues that all citizens struggle with during a war. That said, I was pleased that he chose not to write in the first person.
I'd be particularly interested to learn more about his response to Wikileaks and the release of “Collateral Murder.” On one hand, the book provides a much fuller context for the events in Al-Amin. On the other hand, the meditative tone and Finkel’s arrangement with the military absolved him from having to take a stand on the actions and policies of the soldiers. In the book, he suggests that the journalists may not have acted appropriately (115). He absolves himself from making a judgment by saying, “that would be for others to decide” (ibid). I believe that those “others” are not just military officials. Public intellectuals, like a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, should feel obligated to engage with these questions. It is popular non-fiction like The Good Soldiers that ultimately provides fodder for an engaged public to debate war and the nature/limits of a free press.
The Good Soldiers is so literary and so moving that it may fail to problematize the war, soldiers’ experiences, or traditional concepts of masculinity. The meditative tone, attention to the micro and macro realities of war, and strong characterizations of the 2-16 soldiers creates an engrossing book. Finkel echoes Hemingway’s style when he uses long sentences with many “ands” in them. When he describes an IED or EFP, Finkel begins entire paragraphs with “and was he in the midst of saying something when it happened?” (64). Likewise, readers familiar with Catch-22 will pick up on the allusion in the description of a soldier who “breaks” early in the 2-16’s tour. Finkel asks, “was it an act of mental instability, as some thought, or was it the calculated act of someone trying to get home, which was Kauzlarich’s growing suspicion?” (206). These allusions make the text stronger by underscoring the tragic, deeply confusing nature of war. However, I finished The Good Soldiers wondering if these techniques did not undercut Finkel’s mission to demonstrate the reality of war. When he spoke to an Australian writers conference in 2010, Finkel discussed the importance of finding the right amount of detail. He wanted The Good Soldiers to feel neither distant nor become a kind of “war porn.” I do not suggest that because the book is beautifully written it fails as an exploration of war. However, I suspect that by mimicking some of the great war novels of the 20th century, The Good Soldiers may reinforce readers’ iconic, often romantic, notions of war.
For me to review this book, I need to separate the writing from the ideas. The ideas were 4 star-- Sturken is a great thinker when it comes to notions of cultural memory, mourning, and representations of loss. I adored her other book, "Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering," and this one is very-much in the same vein.
However, the writing and organization in this one was just too much for me. Two stars at best... Hence, the three star rating. It was incredibly disjointed, circled back on itself, and took on way too much without the appropriate level of detail. There were points where I felt like Sturken was talking herself into the argument as she was writing it. There were places where I felt she pushed the argument too far and places where she didn't make obvious connections to other sections of the book. Organizing it by theme rather than site might have helped with some of this disjointedness. Also, the fact that Timothy McVeigh gets a whole chapter while the trial of the 9/11 hijackers is left unmentioned is such an obvious oversight! Her arguments about how memory impacts justice would have been helped by including at least a mention of that controversy.
I think that a good editor should have been given one more pass at it before sending it off to print.
"Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves," by art and architecture historian Kirk Savage, presents a nuanced critique of post-Civil War memorial sculpture that emphasizes gender, race, and a rapidly shifting sense of nationalism. Savage argues that the ambiguous nature of the United States’ national identity after the Civil War is the defining factor in late 19th century memorial design. By examining the process of designing and building monuments to emancipation, Lincoln, the common soldier, and Lee, Savage demonstrates that this uncertainty about the new American identity influenced a variety of distinct memorial projects. Savage is, without a doubt, a “new art historian.” He spends as much time on formal analysis as on the history and social context of the era. The source material used in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves includes the correspondence of planning committees, artist plans that were never executed, and more traditional art history sources. One of Savage’s techniques is comparing a critical reading with the opinions of contemporary critics. This effectively underscores just how unfathomable a black body on a memorial was to 19th century observers. The disconnect between written descriptions of a monument and what he observes in the pieces is striking.
Many scholars of memorials refer to the collective memory as the motivating force behind memorials. Often, there is little discussion of the struggles involved in defining a collective and creating its memory. The collective memory is taken as a given. Savage’s discussion of the “subcollective memory” (125) provides a useful rhetorical device for acknowledging the tension between the “collective memory” of the majority and the kind of vernacular history that is passed down outside the sphere of memorials and public history.
As a reader, I was left wondering what happened to some of these less successful, or outright offensive, monuments. Although it was outside the scope of Savage’s project, learning about how contemporary politics revisit these sites could be an interesting method to explore the ongoing (re)definition of the American national identity. Similarly, some communities found that to express their membership in the new American identity they needed to replace their more artful memorials with the more typical single, standing soldier form (183). A larger discussion about the removal of memorials could add depth to Savage’s observations about the relationship between national identity, race, and sculpture.
Although the book does not discuss monuments built after about 1920, his analysis of the interaction between race and national identity in sculpture remains as relevant to today’s monuments. Were Princeton University Press to publish a new edition, I hope that Savage would add a new introduction or epilogue that extends his arguments forward to the new, and controversial, Dr. King Memorial on the National Mall. The sculpture of Dr. King, in particular, is dramatically different than the pieces that form the bulk of Savage’s analysis. Nevertheless, because the figure of King is not sculpted fully in the round, it suggests incompleteness and the continued applicability of some of Savage’s observations. This may indicate that the bulk of the US collective imagination can embrace Dr. King’s message but that there remains some tension between the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing structural racism that plagues the US.
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Ashley Bowen has commented on (12) products.
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
Ashley Bowen, March 1, 2012
I adored this book. Non-fiction accounts of medical research as a page-turner? Yes, please! Oshinsky masterfully discusses polio in its medical, political, and social context. I found the history of March of Dimes fascinating-- I had no idea about Basil O'Conner and his reasons for pursing polio (or that he was drafted into the cause sort of against his will). Their use of PR techniques for medical advocacy was fascinating and clearly set the blueprint for much medical funding today. Also, I had no idea about the rivalry between Sabine and Salk or just how much of a scientific-outsider Salk really was. Finally, I was glad to see that Oshinsky discussed how polio impacted different communities (e.g. racial groups and income levels) before and after the introduction of the vaccine. The shift of polio from a middle-class to "inner-city" disease, and the corresponding loss of interest and funding, also has parallels today.(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital by Heidi Kraft
Ashley Bowen, February 13, 2012
This book poses many more questions than it answers-- but in this case, that is a good thing. I do not think anyone knows how to make war "tolerable" and Dr. Squier Kraft's perspective is illuminating. It is not easy to read, tears filled my eyes more than once. However, it is worth picking up for anyone interested in war, mental health, or PTSD.After reading Rule Number Two I revisited the idea of "triage." Mirriam Webster's Dictionary defines triage as, "the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors" (emphasis added). Although that word only shows up twice in this book, it seems like an appropriate way to think about battlefield clinical practice and as a metaphor for understanding institutional priorities.
Triage as practice and metaphor does not qualify "surviving"-- in this framework, it is more of an all-or-nothing state. Traumatic brain injuries and PTSD problematize "survival"; suddenly quality of life becomes a much more urgent question and one that is incredibly difficult emotionally, ethically, and legally to understand. Battlefield medicine is getting much better at absolute survival (e.g. lowering numbers of KIA or DOW) but has yet to catch up to the less absolute forms of survival.
I think it is worth noting that Dr. Squier Kraft's memoir tells the story of mental health in Iraq. Her story is fascinating on several levels, but ultimately her job was to figure out who needed to go home, who needed basic treatment, and who needed a chance to cry. In fact, she acknowledges that, "In a normal situation, I would have time to work with [a patient] and and help her move toward the appropriate treatment. Out here, I knew only one thing: she needed to go home"(118). In a sense, the mental health care available in Iraq amounted to triage. Had Squier Kraft's story continued to the US' VA system, we might have learned more about the full spectrum (or lack thereof) of care available to members of the USMC. As it stands, her account suggests the ways in which her practice became about maximizing "survivors"-- and for mental health, "surviving" seems to be about returning to the unit.
Finally, four mental health professionals served 10,000 Marines in western Iraq (3). No wonder their job boiled down to basic triage. If we assume that the military saw front-line mental health only as the most basic level of triage, this makes some degree of sense. In a war zone, I completely understand why you might prioritize surgeons and nurses over "shrinks." However, if the goal is to ensure a more holistic survival, the military has radically underestimated the need. On one hand, I do not fault the military for emphasizing absolute survival over the more nuanced quality-of-life interpretation of "survival." On the other, is there a similar kind of "golden hour" (or week/month) for mental health? Could better front-line mental health interventions prevent/lessen PTSD?
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Ashley Bowen, February 6, 2012
The Good Soldiers, David Finkel’s 2009 account of the 2-16’s eighteen months in eastern Baghdad, provides a profound meditation on the multifaceted reality of war and its costs. Finkel outlines four distinct realities of the war in Iraq: conversations and meetings with Iraqi civilians; uneasy coordination between the US, Iraqi military, and national police; firefights, IEDs, or EFPs; and politics or PR. He also acknowledges that for wives, girlfriends, and family members there is yet a fifth war, characterized by waiting for phone calls, single parenting, resentment, and the emotional and physical demands of a returning soldier. Finkel is careful to avoid explicitly judging one experience of war as somehow more valid or “real” than the others. Implicitly, however, it is clear that his sympathies like with the soldiers’ experience of war.In order to gain access to the 2-16, Finkel promised that his book would not be political or judge the relative success or failure of “the surge.” He is true to his word but The Good Soldiers is not a work of “objective” journalism and is inherently political. Finkel sets up George Bush’s perceptions of the war as an ironic foil for each chapter. Despite telling an Australian audience that it was an attempt to contrast the realities, it is hard to read The Good Soldiers and not feel that Bush was completely out of touch with the war’s reality. This did not bother me so much (I suspect that Finkel and I share similar politics) as his refusal to be transparent about it. The issues, beliefs, and values that motivate his desire to go to Iraq, embed in east Baghdad instead of the Green Zone, and visit Army medical centers are worth exploring�"both in terms of his narrative credibility and because they are issues that all citizens struggle with during a war. That said, I was pleased that he chose not to write in the first person.
I'd be particularly interested to learn more about his response to Wikileaks and the release of “Collateral Murder.” On one hand, the book provides a much fuller context for the events in Al-Amin. On the other hand, the meditative tone and Finkel’s arrangement with the military absolved him from having to take a stand on the actions and policies of the soldiers. In the book, he suggests that the journalists may not have acted appropriately (115). He absolves himself from making a judgment by saying, “that would be for others to decide” (ibid). I believe that those “others” are not just military officials. Public intellectuals, like a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, should feel obligated to engage with these questions. It is popular non-fiction like The Good Soldiers that ultimately provides fodder for an engaged public to debate war and the nature/limits of a free press.
The Good Soldiers is so literary and so moving that it may fail to problematize the war, soldiers’ experiences, or traditional concepts of masculinity. The meditative tone, attention to the micro and macro realities of war, and strong characterizations of the 2-16 soldiers creates an engrossing book. Finkel echoes Hemingway’s style when he uses long sentences with many “ands” in them. When he describes an IED or EFP, Finkel begins entire paragraphs with “and was he in the midst of saying something when it happened?” (64). Likewise, readers familiar with Catch-22 will pick up on the allusion in the description of a soldier who “breaks” early in the 2-16’s tour. Finkel asks, “was it an act of mental instability, as some thought, or was it the calculated act of someone trying to get home, which was Kauzlarich’s growing suspicion?” (206). These allusions make the text stronger by underscoring the tragic, deeply confusing nature of war. However, I finished The Good Soldiers wondering if these techniques did not undercut Finkel’s mission to demonstrate the reality of war. When he spoke to an Australian writers conference in 2010, Finkel discussed the importance of finding the right amount of detail. He wanted The Good Soldiers to feel neither distant nor become a kind of “war porn.” I do not suggest that because the book is beautifully written it fails as an exploration of war. However, I suspect that by mimicking some of the great war novels of the 20th century, The Good Soldiers may reinforce readers’ iconic, often romantic, notions of war.
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero by Marita Sturken
Ashley Bowen, September 30, 2011
For me to review this book, I need to separate the writing from the ideas. The ideas were 4 star-- Sturken is a great thinker when it comes to notions of cultural memory, mourning, and representations of loss. I adored her other book, "Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering," and this one is very-much in the same vein.However, the writing and organization in this one was just too much for me. Two stars at best... Hence, the three star rating. It was incredibly disjointed, circled back on itself, and took on way too much without the appropriate level of detail. There were points where I felt like Sturken was talking herself into the argument as she was writing it. There were places where I felt she pushed the argument too far and places where she didn't make obvious connections to other sections of the book. Organizing it by theme rather than site might have helped with some of this disjointedness. Also, the fact that Timothy McVeigh gets a whole chapter while the trial of the 9/11 hijackers is left unmentioned is such an obvious oversight! Her arguments about how memory impacts justice would have been helped by including at least a mention of that controversy.
I think that a good editor should have been given one more pass at it before sending it off to print.
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (97 Edition) by Kirk Savage
Ashley Bowen, September 30, 2011
"Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves," by art and architecture historian Kirk Savage, presents a nuanced critique of post-Civil War memorial sculpture that emphasizes gender, race, and a rapidly shifting sense of nationalism. Savage argues that the ambiguous nature of the United States’ national identity after the Civil War is the defining factor in late 19th century memorial design. By examining the process of designing and building monuments to emancipation, Lincoln, the common soldier, and Lee, Savage demonstrates that this uncertainty about the new American identity influenced a variety of distinct memorial projects. Savage is, without a doubt, a “new art historian.” He spends as much time on formal analysis as on the history and social context of the era. The source material used in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves includes the correspondence of planning committees, artist plans that were never executed, and more traditional art history sources. One of Savage’s techniques is comparing a critical reading with the opinions of contemporary critics. This effectively underscores just how unfathomable a black body on a memorial was to 19th century observers. The disconnect between written descriptions of a monument and what he observes in the pieces is striking.Many scholars of memorials refer to the collective memory as the motivating force behind memorials. Often, there is little discussion of the struggles involved in defining a collective and creating its memory. The collective memory is taken as a given. Savage’s discussion of the “subcollective memory” (125) provides a useful rhetorical device for acknowledging the tension between the “collective memory” of the majority and the kind of vernacular history that is passed down outside the sphere of memorials and public history.
As a reader, I was left wondering what happened to some of these less successful, or outright offensive, monuments. Although it was outside the scope of Savage’s project, learning about how contemporary politics revisit these sites could be an interesting method to explore the ongoing (re)definition of the American national identity. Similarly, some communities found that to express their membership in the new American identity they needed to replace their more artful memorials with the more typical single, standing soldier form (183). A larger discussion about the removal of memorials could add depth to Savage’s observations about the relationship between national identity, race, and sculpture.
Although the book does not discuss monuments built after about 1920, his analysis of the interaction between race and national identity in sculpture remains as relevant to today’s monuments. Were Princeton University Press to publish a new edition, I hope that Savage would add a new introduction or epilogue that extends his arguments forward to the new, and controversial, Dr. King Memorial on the National Mall. The sculpture of Dr. King, in particular, is dramatically different than the pieces that form the bulk of Savage’s analysis. Nevertheless, because the figure of King is not sculpted fully in the round, it suggests incompleteness and the continued applicability of some of Savage’s observations. This may indicate that the bulk of the US collective imagination can embrace Dr. King’s message but that there remains some tension between the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing structural racism that plagues the US.
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