Disabled soldiers, their reconstruction, and their complex relationship to wartime and postwar societies are subjects that continue to receive considerable attention from historians, especially those who are engaged in writing social and cultural histories of the Great War. Ana Carden‐Coyne's monograph is a challenging and important addition to this ever‐growing body of scholarship. Based on the author's doctoral thesis and an impressive range of research undertaken in Europe, the United States, and Australia, the book “questions why post‐war recovery in Anglophone societies was accompanied by an unrelenting drive to reconstruct, perfect, and beautify the human body” (p. 4). In addressing this question, Carden‐Coyne uncovers, in a variety of cultural contexts and fundamental ways, how “modernism drew upon the classical to reconstruct the body broken in the First World War” (p. 20). Carden‐Coyne's argument takes shape over seven well‐illustrated chapters. Chapter one, “Reconstructing Civilization in Post‐war Culture,” sets the stage by focusing on the European context of academic classical study, its global popularization, and its politicization and manifestations in a range of anglophone contexts. Chapter two, “Culture Shock: Trauma, Pleasure, and Visual Memory,” explores both the traumatic and pleasurable aspects of war through visual culture, film, art, writing, and surgical literature, demonstrating how these diverse media influenced the cultural memory of the disabled body to which reconstruction responded. Chapter three, “Monumental Classicism: Healing the Western Body,” focuses on classical war memorials to reveal how classicism helped to reconstruct the disabled body in memorial architecture. Carden‐Coyne's fourth chapter, “The Sexual Reconstruction of Men,” examines medical rehabilitation, commercial culture, and visual culture to reveal how classicism figured prominently in efforts to restore confidence among men in expressing their sexuality. In chapter five, “The Golden Age of Women,” Carden‐Coyne turns to the subjects of beauty and the female body to show the ways in which both classical and modern imagery manufactured sexuality and gender ideals for women. Chapter six, “Performing the New Civilization,” examines the classical revival dance movement and related notions of fitness and beauty as means for reconstructing women's bodies. Carden‐Coyne's concluding chapter, “Healing and Forgetting,” considers classicism and modernism broadly in relation to cultural memory. Here, she reiterates and underscores the fundamental ways in which anglophone individuals, communities, and institutions embraced classicism and modernism as tools for rebuilding postwar society.