Book reviews -- The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation by Tom Engelhardt

The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. By Tom Engelhardt. (New York: BasicBooks, 1995. x, 351 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-465-01984-6.)

A nation held hostage by the fantasy of invincibility is the mordant theme of free-lancer Tom Engelhardt's sprightly blend of cultural and political criticism, which begins with the colonial captivity narratives and ends with Operation Desert Storm. But the narrative center of his book begins with the base line of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which exposed American naval vulnerability but inspired a military response that could not end short of the unconditional surrender of Japan. United States citizens defined themselves as the victims of an unprovoked assault, and did not doubt--over half a century ago--that conquer they must, for their cause was self-evidently just. Such assurance of victory would be tested in Korea, shaken and seared in Indochina, and then partly...