Incendiary prose

For my money, Norman Mailer’s famous World War II war novel "The Naked and the Dead" just plain stunk. I’m sorry I ever read it. I never read it a second time. I only remember the fashionable cynicism, and the probability that the author never saw combat or had any idea what it was like. Comes this essay reminding me, not only that Mailer’s book was perhaps the first popular literary assault on American military heroism, but that we have the pugnacious little squirt to thank for much more, including the rap generation and the media’s persistent glorification of violence.