Cultures of War

Reviews / Votes

"Consistently perceptive." -- Washington Post "A whopper of a book in both length and intellectual substance. . . . The chapters on the U.S. incendiary and atomic bombing of Japan and the start of the nuclear arms race could stand alone as the wisest current treatment of that vexed history." -- Michael Sherry - American Scholar "Consistently perceptive." -- Gerard De Groot - Washington Post "A lucid and compelling example of how to learn from history, rather than using it as an ideological weapon." -- Drew DeSilver - Seattle Times "Supplemented with visual images that are texts in themselves, Dower's book is a passionate and provocative excursion into the comparative dynamics and pathologies of modern war." -- Glenn C. Altschuler - Philadelphia Inquirer "It takes a nimble mind, and a nimble hand, to link America's regrettable atrocities in the Philippines (whole villages were burned to the ground and their occupants slaughtered) to the events in Iraq. But Dower has the mind and the hand, making a compelling case that, regardless of righteousness, nations with a culture of war will, indeed, wage war. Dower's wide-ranging, thought-provoking book is less an analysis of policy than a dissection of actions and the arguments that framed them...Dower's arguments are deeply, and compellingly, drawn." -- Scott Martelle - Los Angeles Times "Distills a lifetime of reflection and scholarship, persuasively connecting aspects of the 'War of Terror' to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, the better to illuminate the kind of wishful thinking-regardless of cultural difference-that is characteristic of modern warfare." -- National Book Award citation "Dower has found much new and revelatory to tell us about the inanities and horrors of the Bush/Cheney years, and this book goes much deeper-and raises devastating questions about the history we think we know." -- Seymour M. Hersch, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib "A profoundly sobering reflection on war and the many cultures of self-delusion that we, like all other mortal nations, continue to ignore at ever deepening peril." -- Gar Alperovitz, author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb "An unrelenting, incisive, masterly comparative study." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)