This book has been hailed by some reviewers as some kind of moral and intellectual breakthrough, but that is claiming rather too much for it. It is not, however, a mere fashionable, quasi-feminist tract against war and male aggression, but a serious and well-considered attempt to understand why people (mostly men) not only kill each other by the thousand in wartime, but often positively exult in doing so. War, it seems, lies deep within the collective human psyche and women can be as infected by it as males; it is a property of the species as a whole, but it can also be inculcated or developed by military training and "hate" propaganda. In particular, Joanna Bourke shows how deeply the Vietnam War has sunk into American consciousness and how the world's most powerful nation is still haunted by this trauma.