BILLBOARDS AND MOVING BOXESCowardice: A Brief History. By Chris Walsh

Abstract

He banked the fire against the tarp behind them to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their refuge while he told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets … Chris Walsh's study of cowardice is not a brief history, unless we take history in the original Herodotean sense of an investigation, literally the process whereby an agent of seeing and thereby knowing explores a subject. Walsh is discursive like Herodotus and wide-ranging. He tells us lots about what others have had to say about cowardice and about actions, historical and fictional, and concepts, like duty, honour, dignity, patriotism, self-sacrifice, endurance, fear, shame, and post-traumatic stress (PTSD), connected with cowardice and the related social virtue of courage, moral and physical. War features prominently throughout because such notions of human behaviour are best displayed, examined, and defined in the context of the politically sanctioned use of armed force.