摘要：To be held in similar high esteem as scholars like Beth Linker, David Gerber, and Joanna Bourke is a rewarding accomplishment, requiring as prerequisite an historical work of substantial quality. John Kinder is deserving of such esteem due to his new book Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Prob lem of the Disabled Veteran. The topic of veteran disability has all too often been relegated to the outskirts of historical accounts of war. Kinder's work contributes to a growing scholarship that redresses this relegation by focusing on war disability in modern American society. Paying With Their Bodies begins with the emblematic story of Christian Bagge, a disabled veteran of the Iraq War. Bagge had refused to wear pants at his Purple Heart ceremony, instead donning shorts that revealed his injuries. Of ficials had requested long pants, saying, "They didn't want the public to be disturbed" (1 - 2). Less than a year later the young veteran accompanied President George W. Bush on a jog around the White House wearing his Army shirt and shorts, displaying his p rosthetics. Bagge's story is emblematic of the individual and societal processes of coming to terms with the human cost of war, a struggle that has roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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