7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A History of Entertainment with a World War II Theme, December 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering (Hardcover)
This is an academic history of the way the entertainment industry has protrayed World War II and, thus, how and in what manner the war has entered the collective memory. It is mostly free of academic jargon and has 30 pages of footnotes which alone are worth the price of the book. On the one hand, it is a splendid history of the post-war entertainment industry and the way World War II helped to shape it. On the other, it is a thoughtful meditation of how popular culture shapes the nation's historical consciousness. It is the only work I know of which covers the subject, so it is required reading for anyone interested in the subject.
I only give it four stars because of its treatment of Catch-22. The author is correct that the grim anti-war message of that work deepened and enriched the country's memory of the experience of the war, but on another level, Catch-22 played an important role in increasing the nation's amnesia. The moral center of the book is an old Italian peasant who tells Yossarian and his friends that it doesn't matter who wins the war, that he will still be sitting in the door of his house. Nately makes a fool of himself trying to refute the peasant, but the peasant's viewpoint is the viewpoint of Joseph Heller. Indeed, the peasant is about the only character who keeps his dignity in the book. Biedler deals with this matter only in a footnote, calling the peasant "cynical," but Joseph Heller would not have called him that and indeed, when we read Catch-22 in the '60s, all of us knew that the peasant was speaking for Heller (Heller himself admitted that in some of his campus lectures as I recall). The problem with that viewpoint, of course, was that the Italian peasant was not Jewish. If he were, he would not remain sitting on his doorstep when the Nazis marched through. Heller never admitted that sometimes there are things worth fighting for. Indeed, he couldn't have if he wasn't going to write a different book than the one he did. What makes the book courageous is that he wrote an anti-war novel about a war that everybody except Pat Buchanan used to agree was worth fighting. What makes the book cowardly is that Heller finessed the point. In doing so and in writng such a powerful classic, Heller was greatly contributing to "American forgetting." A direct line can be drawn between Catch-22 and those fools who think the Holocaust never happened. That Joseph Heller was a Jew does not excuse him; in fact, it makes his error worse. Biedler should have addressed this very central theme to the way America has treated World War II.
That criticism aside, this is a book which is fascinating to read and thoughtful to boot.
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