If Richard Lingeman, a longtime senior editor at The Nation, found similarities between the early 1940s and the years after 9/11, it does not take a stretch of the imagination to assume there may be some parallels between the years after World War II and the years ahead of us right now, as the wars in Iraq and now Afghanistan begin to finally wind down to an indecisive, belated close. Lingeman doesn’t pursue such inquiries in The Noir Forties, but they are just below the surface of his well-crafted and exceptionally well-researched—and surprisingly personal—new book.

Though Lingeman does an excellent job of defending the thesis behind his title—a topic which we’ll explore in our discussion today—the book is about much more than film noir. It can perhaps be summed up as an extended meditation on Raymond Chandler’s quip that “the story of our time is not the war nor atomic energy but the marriage of an idealist to a gangster and how their home life and children turned out.” We are those children and The Noir Forties goes a long way towards documenting our family history.

On December 2, 1942, a small group of physicists under the direction of Enrico Fermi gathered on an old squash court beneath Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the Campus of the University of Chicago to make and witness history. Uranium pellets and graphite blocks had been stacked around cadmium-coated rods as part of an experiment crucial to the Manhattan Project–the program tasked with building an atom bomb for the allied forces in WWII.

Brubeck wasn’t just a crusader for rhythm. During his service in World War II, Brubeck was spotted playing a Red Cross show and ordered to form a band. Brubeck chose a racially integrated lineup, a rarity for military acts. During the 1950s and ’60s, Brubeck is reported to have canceled appearances at venues that balked at the mixed racial makeup of his quartet.

There are two key words to keep in mind when reading Thomas Ricks’s important and eminently readable new book, “The Generals”: accountability and relief. Accountability is what set Ricks out on his investigation of America’s military leaders from World War II to the present, as in the missing accountability of our generals for the failures of the post-9/11 decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. And relief is what Ricks believes has been too often missing, as in the old-fashioned sense of the word and one that is hardly ever used anymore, certainly by the U.S. military: firing.

The Dissent Papers is that rare treat of scholarship that reflects careful research and close attention to lively, elegant prose. I recommend it highly to all interested readers. If this afternoon’s exchange is only half as rich as the book itself, we’ll all still walk away having been deeply enriched.

“Your father is a murderer”

Was he? Or did William Colby act for what he saw as the highest good for America and the the world? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can we ever really know our families? These questions and more are at the center of The Man Nobody Knew, a portrait of William Colby, by his son and Emmy-award winning director, Carl Colby, our guest tonight.

Massachusetts issued the New World’s first paper currency in 1690. With poor soldiers returning from a failed campaign against the French in Quebec, the colony found itself short on silver and copper coins to pay the men for their service. To solve the problem, the government printed bills of credit—promises of payment once the colony had collected more taxes. These slips of inked paper, deeds to a future fortune, quickly spread, offering a convenient medium of exchange for all thirteen colonies, whose reserves of precious metals were scanty and often concentrated only in the hands of the rich.

Clearly, War Is A Lie is an ambitious effort, organized around ideas rather than chronology, taking in, albeit briefly, most of the wars we talk about, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the two World Wars, back to the Civil War and even to antiquity. It is full of eye-opening facts that cast doubt on the school textbook version of events, and “wow” moments where we are made to question our deepest assumptions. David Swanson whets my appetite for a much more discerning look at particular wars I thought I knew much about, and more importantly, about war itself. He is particularly effective in demonstrating the cynicism and duplicity of leaders who tell us that war is for one purpose, while knowing full well that it is for another.

Swanson’s passion for the topic, his compassion for all peoples, his fresh thinking and his commitment to questioning conventional attitudes toward war and exposing popular myths and fallacies are what stand out. He presents many significant pieces of history that are not widely known and effectively assumes the mantle of moral guide. Swanson makes a compelling case for our re-examining our own knowledge about why we make war, and underlines the deception and folly that is almost always at the core of such violent adventures. Compared to traditional histories and analyses, and even with its drawbacks, I consider War Is A Lie an important work and one worthy of our attention. I’m glad to moderate this conversation.

Rank creep is almost more pernicious than mission creep.

[Welcome Author and Journalist, Rita Cosby, and Host Dennis Showalter, Professor, History, Colorado College] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev] Quiet Hero: Secrets from My Father’s Past “I know my dad was in the war, but I only began [...]