Maggie's Farm

Elizabeth Samet teaches Literature at West Point. A quote from a review of her book, Soldier's Heart, in Newsweek:

It's hard for any good teacher of English to get away from war; great literature is soaked in it. Along with love, war supplies us with the greatest human drama. And war, like love, seems to somehow be essential to the human condition. "You may not be interested in war," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "but war is certainly interested in you." For Samet, teaching these young cadets, the trick is to reconcile romantic notions of honor and glory with harsher realities, the randomness of death by IED or the savagery of bombing civilians—all the great and terrible things that humans do when fighting for their lives against other humans. In her new book, "Soldier's Heart," she does it beautifully. The book, named after an archaic term for combat fatigue or, to use the modern acronym, PTSD, is a recollection of her 10 years of teaching English at West Point, but it is much more than that: a meditation on the need for both myth and reality in preparing young officers for war.