Why read War Beyond Words?

Book cover of War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present

Book description

What we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding, terrifying light. These lenses are not fixed; they change over time, and Jay Winter's panoramic history of war and memory offers an unprecedented study of transformations in our imaginings…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked War Beyond Words as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Shannon Bontrager

Author

Some may disagree with me, but I think this is Winter’s masterpiece. It is a book that charts the ways our remembrance of the war dead changed from the violence of the First World War to the Holocaust to the present. He looks at film, photographs, literature, and war memorials to show how our memories have become less vertical and more horizontal over time and how we have focused less and less on the faces of the dead and more and more on the names of the masses, such as one finds on Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington,…

From Shannon's list on The best history books on the memory of the war dead.