...What.

[tiamatschild]

On battlefields stretching from the Solomons to Burma, the medical problems of jungle warfare continued to mount. For a time after General MacArthur reached Australia, it seemed that the next battle might be fought there, perhaps in the island contients's tropical north. But after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the eyes of allied commanders turned instead to the strange land that lay beyond the warm waters of the Torres Strait.

As a battlefield, New Guinea was unique - a huge, primitive island of sometimes stunning beauty, with cloud-capped mountains, tangled jungles, painted headhunters, glorious birdlife, and abominable diseases. It seemed to belong to a younger earth where life was more fecund, its forms more preposterous and splendid. But those who fought there found intolerable labor and death in an endless variety of forms.
Fighting for Life: American Military Medicine in World War II, Albert E. Cowdrey

What. What. What the hell. Why, Dr. Cowdrey, why? Couldn't we relate the medical history of the U.S. Armed forces in the forties sans weirdo racist exoticizing objectification?

He keeps doing this. If I weren't required to write a review of this book, I'd have given up by now.

*hands*

Comments

[aldanise]

Oh, no, of course not. The objectification makes it a smoother read, see, so that the book can be said to be aimed at the general reader as well as specialists. It's important that the reader feel like they're there, looking through the eyes of the military men venturing forth. (Never mind that he's probably othering people in that military, much less potential readers.)

*grumble*

[tiamatschild]

Aaaagh yeah. And see, Cowdrey was eleven in '42, so this is probably stuff he grew up reading in newspapers and the kind of magazine that "takes a look back", but the book is from 1994, which I would think is long enough to gain some degree of critical distince from your childhood. Nostalgia is not really the goal here - or at least I wouldn't think.