John Ibson’s The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men extends an inquiry that began in Ibson’s 2002 book, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. In the latter work, Ibson analyzed vernacular photographs of men to reveal shifts in men’s relationships to other men. The imagery he collected suggested that since photography’s advent in the United States there was an unselfconscious physical and emotional closeness that men exhibited in photographs. While this closeness began to diminish in early twentieth-century photographs as the concept of a fixed, oriented sexuality emerged, World War II—“the largest same-sex gathering in American history”—opened a space for the development of intimate male relationships, whether of a platonic, romantic, or sexual nature (7). In this new book, Ibson shifts his focus to the cultural constraints of the postwar era that inhibited male closeness. After the war, America experienced an unprecedented fear and loathing of homosexuality. Thanks to an admixture of anti-communism and homophobia, same-sex intimacy was demonized like never before. While the sexual conservatism and homophobia of the era is well documented by scholars, more novel is Ibson’s contention that there were tangible personal, emotional, and psychological costs to America’s aversion to male intimacy, and not just for gay men. The affection that wartime camaraderie had engendered, the emotional trauma of war, the loss of buddies and lovers, residual survivor’s guilt, and postwar stigmatization of same-sex intimacy gave way to feelings of melancholy and isolation. According to Ibson, the immediate postwar era “may be meaningfully characterized as a prolonged period of mourning after the war, with an attendant sense of loss and longing, and may also be viewed meaningfully as a morning after, with such a time’s own attendant feelings of guilt and penitence” (xvii).