Books : Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point

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Author name: Elizabeth D. Samet

: Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 810.71174731
EAN num: 9780374180638
ISBN number: 0374180636
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: October 16, 2007
Publishing house: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 169750
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux



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Product Description:
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.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Humanizing Our Soldiers through Literature
I met Professor Elizabeth Samet a few months ago when she came to Boston to do a reading and book-signing of her new work: "Soldier's Heart - Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point." One of her students, now 2LT David Addams, told me that I would enjoy meeting her and reading her book. Lieutenant Addams was right on both counts. Dr. Samet is a bit of an enigma; she is a civilian professor with solid Ivy League credentials - Harvard and Yale - who has chosen to teach at a military academy. In this book, she blends together artfully the worlds of literature with the world of a warrior.

Professor Samet chronicles her process of acclimating herself to the unique West Point culture and ethos. She describes Dan, one of her colleagues in the Department of English: "Dan's speech is a wonderfully improbable amalgamation of the scatological and the academic. He wrestles with philosophical theories as if they are calves to be roped or deer to be butchered." (Pages 6-7)

Samet does a nice job of highlighting some of the ways in which West Point is unlike most institutions of higher learning, especially with regard to the relationship between the Academy and the parents of cadets:

"Organized parental visitations have always struck me as somewhat infantilizing. I remember my mother and father going to elementary school, even high school, open houses, but they never met any of my college professors, nor did they know the names of the courses they were paying for. Mine are not parents anyone would call uninterested, but there was a stage after which it became unseemly to manifest their interest on site. Yet my parents didn't drop me off at Harvard Yard for freshman orientation with the fear that I might one day be returned to them in a flag-draped coffin. One of my former students, Joey, while serving with the Old Guard in Washington, D.C., routinely escorted such coffins from Dover Air Force Base, and he has told me it is the most difficult assignment he's had, more brutal in its way than his tour in Iraq. The administration of the Academy recognizes the deep-seated need of the parents whose children it admits to see firsthand something of day-to-day operations. The opportunity to visit with an English professor for a few minutes and to get a report on their children's progress is therefore something, if not always enough, for parents wrapped in apprehensions as tightly as they are in those grey parkas. Some trepidation must always accompany pride for the families of soldiers, but the imaginings of those parents in October 2001 were far more desperate in view of the fact that the stakes of American soldiering had suddenly been raised." (Page 10)

The author makes it clear early in the book that she wrestles with complex emotions around the issue of teaching cadets who will soon be sent to war:

"I imagine it would be difficult to know your students are going to war under any circumstances. As it happens, I remain unconvinced by any of the stated reasons given for the invasion of Iraq and dismayed by its civilian architects' apparently cavalier lack of foresight, and because many of my former students, in whom I very much believe, participated in the invasion and continue to serve in the occupying force, it is an adventure that has provoked in me deep sorrow and anger. As I look back on the last few years, I realize how frustrated I've become about not only the prosecution of the war in Iraq but also the ways in which our own country, even as it celebrates the abstraction of the military's sacrifice, has become disconnected in the absence of the draft from the individuals who fight." (Pages 13-14)

In each of our nation's prestigious service academies, there is always a healthy tension between seeing the institution as a liberal arts college preparing the whole person to deal with the vicissitudes of life and leadership and the tendency to view it as a "trade school" that teaches warriors the nuts and bolts of their trade. Dr. Samet addresses this tension:

"Champions of the liberal education cadets receive at West Point - and those champions include the general officers who lead the institution - are fond of the following quotation, sometimes attributed to Thucydides but in fact penned by the British general Sir William Francis Butler: `The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.'" (Pages 75-76)

The English professor has an interesting perspective on how she views her teaching as providing another kind of weapon in the arsenal that her former students take with them into battle:

"From the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798 to the USA Patriot Act of 2001, American presidents have tended to meet crises with legislation designed to curtail and suspend rather ... Read More


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Well Written, But Why?
"Soldiers Heart" is a good idea for a book. Ever since reading the current Remick book "Understanding West Point" and his 1999 forerunner "Mr. Jefferson's Academy", both of which were unique in making extensive use of literature, I have liked the idea that soldiers can go into combat armed with literature in their psyche as well as courage in their hearts. The authors show that you can have both. Truthfully, however, I must say, I do get the impression that, before this book, the good Ms. Stamet had not done anything too remarkable in her life to warrant her making this book into somewhat of an autobiography. Though I do not like the author's liberal flavor of current events and her political correctness (and surprised West Point has someone like that teaching there) she HAS accomplished a remarkable feat writing a book like "Soldier's Heart" right under the noses of those who are supposed to be the Army's watchdogs of officer education. So, congratulations to Ms. Stamet on a well written book and on pulling this off.
"Soldier's Heart inspired me to read other books on this same "west point" web page of Amazon.com. Speaking of the Remick book, one of those books (that I now think is probably the best practical book on leadership I've read) is the other current Remick book, "West Point: Beyond Leadership of Character". I would highly recommend it to every cadet and graduate who cares about their own future. As Ms. Stamet "dared" to write the politically correct book, "Soldier's Heart", Remick "dared" to write a book about going even beyond the leadership of character they teach at West Point. In any event, I commend "Soldier's Heart" as good, and I also recommend you go from good to great by reading "West Point: Beyond Leadership of Character"


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Schoolmasters and soldiers
This is a book by a civilian English Literature professor teaching cadets at West Point. The focus is on her relationships with students and colleagues. It is not evaluative or critical of West Point nor the United States military as much as it is a self evaluation. Samet's colonels and cadets provide us with some valuable lessons about how well this nation has accomplished the purpose of higher education and a national military academy in its free society rooted in the founding of both the Republic and the USMA. Adams and Jefferson, with their particular wisdom encouraged the multiplicity of educational paths which has given such strength to the confidence we have in our military services. The role of the volunteer citizen-soldier is well known to all of us via ROTC of our public and land grant colleges, but we may have less contact with the professional soldier who is a product of West Point or the other service academies.
This book presents these people( women, now, as well as men) as both typical American college students and as somewhat different, shaped as they are by a precise career path, conditions and expectations. The career officers, typically graduates returning to the West Point staff after a variety of duties, are similarly depicted by means of anecdotes about classroom experiences and letters and meetings. This humanizing portrait, not always flattering, helps the reader to appreciate the complexities at the heart of at very first sometimes seemingly silly situations. An incident of a hat left behind after class and a hatless cadet, torn between hatlessness in this most uniform of environments and unofficial borrowing of the hat unquestionably left by the taker of his hat, as well as an upperclassman's practical solution makes the value of a philosophical discusion of ethical choice understandable; although, the author does not draw the moral, we see the importance of balancing scruples vs exegency in a future life and death situation. What guidelines are there to deal with the always new nature of command.
Samet offers some literary models to her students. I might include a few more, especially the studies of command in Conrad's Secret Sharer, Crane's Red Badge, the dilemma of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and clearly more Shakespeare, but the subjects she discusses are valid points of debate in literature classes. I must disagree with other reviewers on the author's "politically correct" attitude and style. We are trapped in English by our gendered pronouns, and sometimes "P.C." attempts are absurd, but this author's use is clearly situational. So, too, she takes care to discuss teaching, not the war. I was envious, however, of the continued contact she seems to maintain with former students. One of the pains of the academic life is that after a long career so many young people who are for a semester or two the focus of attention become sparks of a moment in a professor's life. She gives us a picture of a caring mentor to whom her students return.


Rated by buyers 1 out of 5 stars - Not The Way We're Gonna Win
I agree with the other grads. Find another book to read. This is too liberal, too politically correct, and too critical of our government. They're supposed to be creating leaders who are tough in mind and body, not cynical apologists. Anyone on staff who recommends this book should be separated, in my opinion. What is happening to West Point when things like this are not disparaged up there?


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Good perspective
A well written account of how literature affects the soldiers, written by a woman who knew nothing about the military when she became an instructor in the English Department at West Point. As a graduate of that institution, I can say that she has a good understanding of the trials and tribulations of cadets as they struggle with their daily lives as well as the prospect of going off to war ... and possible death.

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