Raritan on War

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war—the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother’s hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.

Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook