:The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000

Abstract

Under the banner of war and culture, military history has gained new ground in academe. International History Review devoted its September 2005 issue to a debate on the culture of combat; the Journal of American History published a lengthy forum on the cultural analysis of American military history in March 2007; and French Historical Studies dedicated the spring 2008 issue to “War, Society, and Culture.” Most significantly, after paying scant attention to military history for decades, the American Historical Review published Robert M. Citino's article “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction” in October 2007. Citino's treatment is broad, but war and culture figure large. This stimulating new book by Yuval Noah Harari on the revelatory nature of military experience exemplifies this cultural turn. The author identifies himself specifically as a military historian who is “quite jealous of the rights of the sub-discipline” (p. 23), yet his discussion diverges from the repertoire of most historians of warfare. Although the title of his book implies that he addresses war culture as a whole, he deals extensively with only one aspect of it: the way in which soldiers characterized military experience, particularly combat. Harari references the realities of war and discusses military theory, but above all he stresses perception and description as valuable in themselves. As a result, his work will engage historians concerned with the self, the body, memory, philosophy, psychology, literature, visual arts, and even film. Harari dealt with some of the same evidence and argument in his first book, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450–1600 (2004), but his new volume is far more impressive, although still vulnerable to some criticism.