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Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 0374180636
EAN: 9780374180638
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize
the army “from the stories of their fathers and from the
movies.” For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she
used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on
Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher,
however, these students, cadets at the United States
Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn
make-believe into real life.
West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended
graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her
for teaching literature to young men and women who were
training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier’s
Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life
as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet’s
relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet’s former
students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry
of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M.
Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney.
Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what
she owes to cadets in the classroom.
Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and
has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier’s
Heart, she reads this transformation through her own
experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining
what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a
military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in
the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political
zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to
patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is
currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet
offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship
between art and life.
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