In the captivating and well-written Paying with Their Bodies, John M. Kinder explores the cultural anxieties over, and the political and technological responses to, disabled American war veterans from the World War I era to the approximate present. Kinder's research focusses primarily on the years during and after World War I when the “problem of the disabled veteran” (3) emerged out of the carnage of modern warfare and the attendant fears over whether disabled men would serve as a financial drain on public finances and a morale-sapping reminder of the horrors of war long after the fighting had ended. Kinder ably demonstrates how a rehabilitationist impulse created by lay and medical experts and American government officials alike sought to remedy the “problem” by investing resources in rebuilding the physical, emotional, and vocational lives of the disabled veterans. But he also provides detailed discussion of the failure of that rehabilitationist effort to solve the problem or to silence the voice of the disabled veteran in American politics and culture. Kinder's book is a remarkable cultural history of the United States in the twentieth century that contemplates war's long-term impact, an impact that rehabilitationists purposely tried to conceal, by fixing the American disabled veteran at the center of the story. In doing so, Paying with Their Bodies makes vital contributions to the field of American studies and to the related fields of disability studies and war studies.

While a few other scholars have noted the emergence of the “problem” veteran and the rise of the rehabilitation ethos, Paying with Their Bodies is especially noteworthy for the depth of research and the complexity of the conversation about disabled veterans that Kinder traces over the period from 1917 to 1941. Other scholars have investigated this mostly as a political or medical problem, but Kinder repeatedly demonstrates the wider cultural and political phenomena of the interwar period in which the disabled veteran's image featured prominently. Using a superb array of source material – from government records to veterans’ organizational material to cultural productions such as film, music, literature, cartoons, and theater – Kinder has simply mastered the intricacies of the interwar conversation over the disabled veteran, including the leading voices of disabled veterans themselves. His discussion of how the deployment of the imagery of disabled veterans became the most powerful component of interwar peace propaganda is a keen insight that helps us rethink the tensions over disabled veterans and their actual agency to speak for themselves. So, too, his excellent discussion of disabled veterans and commemoration notes that while dead soldiers “speak to us” only through the ventriloquism of commemoration, disabled veterans partially retained their voices, often uncomfortably for the American public.

While there is so much to admire in Kinder's analysis, there is room for criticism in one key area. Kinder's final section with one substantive chapter on the post-1945 persistence of the “problem of the disabled veteran” skips across time and contexts from 1945 and double amputee Harold Russell's casting in The Best Years of Our Lives all the way through to the end of the first Gulf War. The careful, exhaustive research and layered cultural analysis that is so finely crafted in the majority of the book (235 out of the 266 pages of chapter text) somewhat falls by the wayside into this long, sweeping, impressionistic section. Were it framed as an epilogue, this reader might not have flinched. But framed as an equal section in the narrative, this reader found it an ill-advised decision that served to undermine the careful historical re-creation of the “problem” as it emerged out of World War I. Instead, it gets generalized in the end into a recurring, almost decontextualized, cultural problem. While much can be hypothesized about this culturally persistent trope, the narrative would have been cleaner either by ending it in 1941, where the bulk of the research ends, or by giving somewhat equal attention to the later period. Nonetheless, Kinder has accomplished a great deal in his book by centering the disabled veteran in the ongoing conversation about the impact of war on American culture. It will be the go-to source for scholars and the general reading public alike. And no one who reads it will be able to forget it.