The War At Home

This is a must handbook for private study and group discussion by all progressive and radical activists. Today's defense depends on our knowledge of yesterday's repression. The message: the political police haven't forgotten us--we can't afford to forget them and their methods.--Philip Agee, former CIA agent

A portrait of the strains of a military marriage and meditation on what it means to be left behind—a brave account of the challenges facing the wife of a Naval fighter pilot. When she fell in love with her brother’s best friend, Rachel Starnes had no idea she was about to repeat a painful family pattern—marrying a man who leaves regularly and for long stretches to work a dangerous job far from home. Through constant relocations, separations, and the crippling doubts of early parenthood, Starnes effortlessly weaves together strands from her past with the relentless pace of Navy life in a time of war. Searingly honest and emotionally unflinching—and at times laugh out loud funny—Starnes eloquently evokes the challenges she faces in trying to find and claim a sense of home while struggling to chart a new path and avoid passing on the same legacy to her two young sons. At once a portrait of the devastating strains that military life puts on families and a meditation on what it means to be left behind, The War at Home is a brave portrait of a modern military family and the realities of separation, endurance, and love that overcomes. “Rachel Starnes’s The War at Home navigates the joys, fears, compromises, and casualties that create the terrain of marriage. And if you are a military spouse, her memoir will reveal thoughts you never even knew you had. This is a wise and fearless book.” —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone “One of the most honest and genuine memoirs I’ve ever read, as well as one of the most finely written. There’s not a false note in these pages. Rachel Starnes’s story is at once both singular and emblematic. . . . The War at Home is that rare thing: a book about the here and now that promises to last well beyond next month or next year.” —Steve Yarbrough, award-winning author of The Realm of Last Chances and Safe from the Neighbors

While numerous analysts have discussed, and decried, the geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, the attention to America's imperial posture overseas has turned eyes away from a crucial dimension of belligerent foreign policy: the domestic politics of war. Frances Fox Piven, one of the most celebrated US social scientists, raises questions others have not. She examines the ways the War on Terror served to reinforce the Bush administration's political base and analyzes the manner in which flag-waving politicians used the emotional fog of war to further their regressive social and economic agendas. Always in the past, US governments that made war sooner or later tried to reward their peoples for the blood and wealth they were forced to sacrifice. During World War II, tax rates on the wealthy rose to 90 percent; toward the end of the Vietnam War, 18-year-olds were given the right to vote.

The War at Home brings together some of the state's leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.

The War at Home brings together some of the state’s leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.

This book details how American civilians supported the efforts of their troops overseas.