The Best War Ever: America and World War II (The American Moment) - Softcover

This book will be most valuable to students and general readers who have not given World War II serious study but who are interested in achieving a better understanding of America's experience in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called 'the Great Crusade.'

Adams... uses his demythologizing lens to provide a rich overview of American involvement in the war... Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems.

Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time.

Was it really such a "good war"? It was, if popular memory is to be trusted. We knew who the enemy was. We knew what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. It was a war of tanks and airplanes―a cleaner war than World War I. Americans were united. Soldiers were proud. It was a time of prosperity, sound morality, and power.

But according to historian Michael Adams, our memory is distorted, and it has left us with a misleading―even dangerous―legacy. Challenging many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues that our experience of World War II was positive but also disturbing, creating problems that continue to plague us today.