Disasters and Heroes

Book excerpt: Images of war and its commemoration are an everyday presence in contemporary culture, from the embedded reporter in the field to the Last Post at the Menin Gate. Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation revisits campaigns from the plains of Troy to recent events in the Balkans, examining how wars are represented and remembered. Angus Calder shows how the 'facts'of war are transformed into myths that condition later responses to war, and how the construction of memory begins with wartime events themselves. Beginning with a section devoted to war memorials and the public remembrance of war, such as D-Day commemorations, the essays collected in Disasters and Heroes then look at the lived experience of war for 'ordinary' people, while the final section deals with literary representation of war, from The Iliad to T.E. Lawrence and on to Christa Wolf's Cassandra. Disasters and Heroes is a thought-provoking collection dealing with issues of major significance which recent events have made painfully topical.