"Torgovnick has begun to do for the Second World War what for some years now thoughtful scholars and critics have done for the Civil War: to explore how our patriotism can survive if we acknowledge terrible truths. Her promising ethical solution transcends identity politics in a way that should open important further discussion."
— Jonathan Arac
"An audaciously wide-ranging cultural critique of how World War II has entered contemporary modern memory and consciousness. This is an important and illuminating book that will have a large and receptive audience."
— James E. Young
"Through personal rumination and inventive analysis, Torgovnick offers an inspiring model for a new way to write cultural history. Her lucid, companionable voice leads us through nightmare with exemplary generosity and intelligence."
— Wayne Koestenbaum
"A beautifully written meditation, at once wide ranging and intensely focused by the master thesis that at the heart of modernity lies the consciousness of war and the spectacle-horrifying and yet strangely narcotic-of mass death."
— Stanley Fish
"Marianna Torgovnick is one of our most brilliant and probing cultural critics."
— Joyce Carol Oates
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2006
— CHOICE
"A provoking and ethical book. . . . In an age when information is ephemeral, any book which recovers forgotten history is laudable."
— James Ervin, Rain Taxi
"This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration."
— Eric Solomon, American Literature
"Togovnick's book should find a wide readership among scholars of international relations who hope to understand how cultural reporesentations can shape attitudes towards past and future conflicts."
— Ronald J. Granieri, International History Review
"Torgovnick serves as a kind of quirky and compelling guide on a walking tour of popular memory, drawing us in with her enthusiasm for her subject and provoking us to notice—and to think deeply about—the cultural and literary landscape of the post-World War II era."
— Tami Davis Biddle, The Historian