The remains of war : bodies, politics, and the search for American soldiers unaccounted for in Southeast Asia /

Hawley (Eastern Washington Univ.) suggests that the US mission to account for the bodies of missing military personnel from the Vietnam War was unique in the history of American wars and that the quest was excessive. He contends that the obsession is the product of the nation's failure to come to grips with the ambiguities and defeat in this war. Although this argument might have some legitimacy, the author's hyperbolic postmodern "genealogical perspective" about the absent body's cultural and ontological significance crosses into the absurd. In truth, it is difficult to discern what Hawley is trying to say because the convoluted, abstruse prose makes the book virtually unreadable. It takes tortuous effort to fight through the verbiage. Brief interjections of insight and lucidity are overwhelmed by the shallow, trendy, pseudotheoretical construct of the treatise. Why a distinguished press would publish such pathetic rambling is a question. The Vietnam War literature contains more than its share of truly silly and bad "scholarship." This book ranks in the higher stratum of those categories. ^BSumming Up: Not recommended. J. P. Dunn Converse College