Chancellor's Professor of History and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, John Bodnar is a well-known historian of memory and commemoration. In his previous works, he has demonstrated a particular sympathy for and interest in the narratives and memories of everyday Americans, and he continues this trajectory with his most recent work on the memory of World War II. This book seeks to puncture heroic and sentimental myths about the “Good War” propagated by many works at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than being swept along by the heady celebration of the greatest generation, Bodnar encourages us to reexamine how World War II has been commemorated historically over the last sixty years. Although always careful never to challenge the validity or necessity of the war effort, he nevertheless seeks to complicate our understanding and recover voices and stories that have been overwhelmed by the deluge of triumphalist memories. Examining evidence of remembrance through memorialization, film, and personal and journalistic accounts, he argues that the understandings of World War II during and after the war were never uniform or complete. In addition to traditional, celebratory memories of the war, other more critical remembrances circulated in local and national conversations about the meaning of the war and the generation that conducted it.

In making this argument, Bodnar's primary aim is to valorize critical and humanitarian narratives of loss and suffering that downplay, or even challenge, the heroism of the United States government and American soldiers abroad. His focus on exposing the triumphalist myths that have long dominated popular understanding of the war proves effective; by the end, the reader comes away with a much more nuanced understanding of how everyday Americans have interpreted the war over the last sixty years. At the same time, however, his intense focus on demolishing these cherished assumptions prevents him from developing a robust counternarrative. Oddly enough, the book spends too much time outlining the dominant narrative, and not enough on how and why the marginalized voices shift over time. In telling his story of how a time of contestation (which must be recovered) is followed by a time of conformity and unity, he treats developments from the 1950s to the 1990s in an almost episodic and flattened way. These decades witnessed seismic events in American culture that played crucial roles in shaping how the war was interpreted and remembered. These events warrant detailed and systematic examination, but in Bodnar's story they are not fully developed or explored. Also, the alternative memories of some outsider groups are left out – most notably, the memories of Jewish Americans are not addressed in any comprehensive fashion.

Still, it may be asking too much for Bodnar to do all of this heavy lifting by himself. He does an admirable job of dismantling popular assumptions regarding the Good War and the greatest generation. He highlights that the noble virtues of sacrifice, heroism, and bravery that often are associated with Americans during and after the war were accompanied by more ignoble but nonetheless all too human feelings of regret, fear, worry, and sadness. In this way, Bodnar's fine book is an important first step in revising our understanding and appreciation of the true costs associated with the most horrific conflict of the twentieth century.