'Soldier's Heart' has heartbreaking relevance

'Soldier's Heart' has heartbreaking relevance
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
Fresh out of Harvard and Yale, Elizabeth Samet began teaching English at West Point a decade ago, when life there was peaceful — "there's no other word for it," she writes. Then came 9/11.
Samet and her students — future second lieutenants — found new meaning in works such as Tolstoy's War and Peace and Randall Jarrell's poem, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.
Samet's account of teaching and learning, Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, is absolutely fascinating. Never has Tolstoy or Homer seemed more relevant.
Her book explores serious issues — moral questions about courage and obedience — but with graceful writing and flashes of humor.
She is an outsider: a civilian and a woman in a military culture of, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, "unmitigated masculinity."
click post title for the rest