Elizabeth d samet biography of michaels
•
The idea that in a democracy people get the government they deserve is often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, a book that has so much to tell Americans about themselves. (It isn't clear that he ever said it.) Lately, I've been wondering: Do the people get the heroes they deserve as well?
This question has begun to preoccupy me. Last fall, I taught a seminar on alternative heroisms to a group of first-year students (plebes) at West Point, where they are preparing to become commissioned officers in the U.S. Army. There is no audience more eager to understand the stakes of their commitment to military service than this one, and a consideration of heroism is inseparable from the contemplation of military service in the West, which has been celebrating martial heroes since Homer gave us Achilles in all his belligerent glory.
Advertisement
At a time when the heroic status accorded to first-responders after 9/11 has been shaken by events in Fergus
•
In No Man’s Land, Elizabeth Samet attempts to construct, or re-construct, a anställda narrative that makes sense of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, particularly as they have colored her relationship with the cadets she teaches at the United States Military Academy. Samet, a full professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at West Point, is the author of an earlier work titled Soldiers’ Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. Published in 2007, Soldier’s Heart was well-received by both critics and popular reading audiences and in my mind deservedly so. Samet’s meditation about her own relation to, not to say complicity with, the post-9/11 wars represented an early, important statement about how the wars were going to be processed by the nation’s elit. Along with Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet and Colby Buzzell’s My War, Soldier’s Heart staked out forms and manners that were both highly literary and very responsive to new imperatives—t
•
The last book John Pitman checked out—the last trace I could find of him in the ledgers—was volume one of Thackeray’s The Virginians. I don’t know if Pitman ever finished the novel, nor do I know what books he read after graduation. But I like to imagine that he remained an eclectic reader throughout his career in the Ordnance Corps, which was long and successful—he retired as a brigadier general in 1906—yet largely uncelebrated outside of friends, family, and weapons experts. Pitman became a “powder specialist,” who, as his nomination to the Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame explains, made “significant contributions … in the fields of explosives, propellants, and the history of small arms.” Among those contributions were a series of volumes on weaponry, The Pitman Notes, and the production of a variety of “smokeless powder”—ammunition that replaced the black powder that for centuries fouled weapons and obscured battlefields with clouds of smoke.
The Virginians, a historical nove