Knee Deep in the Hooah!

I do agree that reading is indeed fundamental, but reading can also be a very powerful tool. When I was in undergrad I led a fairly large sized group of female inmates in a low level security prison through a literature course. These women were one step away from leaving the prison system and reentering the world as free citizens — for some it would be decades since they had been free to come and go as they please.

I was treading on thin ice back then because I was not at a level yet in my profession that would allow me to lead people through a therapeutic approach called “bibliotherapy” without intense supervision. Regardless of the barriers, I found a way to use the print literature (books mostly) and other forms of media (music, speeches and movies) as a tool to spark discourse around topics such as getting out of prison and reintegrating back into society, the crimes they had committed, and how breaking the law has affected not only them but everyone who loves them.

We used Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic as a filtering lens as we read Alice Walker’s Color Purple and later watched the movie. The women loved using literature and discussion to breech new topics and explore questions they had not felt comfortable exploring in the past.

I have not thought much about the group in the past few years, but a new book I am reading has brought a lot of those memories to the forefront of my mind. It’s not about women in prison or crimes committed, but rather it’s a book about literature’s powerful ability to shape and form our ideas on topics such as the the military and war.

I was invited by a publicist to read a book written by a West Point civilian professor and offer a review on my blog. I think that this will be a books you just don’t want to put down, so be looking for the review very soon. The book is titled Soldier’s Heart

Excerpt from book sleeve:

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army “from the stories of their fathers and from the movies.” For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life.

West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier’s Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet’s relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet’s former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom.

Tags: literacy, military, veterans, war on terror //