Modern Mystery

The Mystery of Courage, by William Ian Miller (Harvard, 346 pp., $29.95)

William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of piquant volumes on Humiliation (1993) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), is brave enough to have written a book about courage, a subject he regards—as much at the end as at the beginning of his story—as a “mystery.” Not that its mysteriousness prevents it from being of absorbing interest. Miller is at his best in displaying the results of his trawlings through the literature of war for examples that illuminate what he calls “the emotional terrain” of courage, which includes all those counterurges—fear, shame, humiliation, and disgust—that courage must overcome.

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James Bowman

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The Mystery of Courage, by William Ian Miller (Harvard, 346 pp., $29.95)

William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of piquant volumes on Humiliation (1993) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), is brave enough to have written a book about courage, a subject he regards—as much at the end as at the beginning of his story—as a “mystery.” Not that its mysteriousness prevents it from being of absorbing interest. Miller is at his best in displaying the results of his trawlings through the literature of war for examples that illuminate what he calls “the emotional terrain” of courage, which includes all those counterurges—fear, shame, humiliation, and disgust—that courage must overcome.