Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje stands before us as Atticus, an African warrior-gladiator, fighter and humane soldier forced into constant combat for promise of freedom.
Though the counterfactuals in Roberts's conclusion provoke thought, the real interest of his book resides in its robustly conventional virtues — scholarly dedication to the sources, humane identification with the soldiers and remarkably effective prose.
The latest work, by a French-Israeli filmmaker, Pierre Rehov, is a strongly pro-Israeli account that portrays Israeli soldiers as humane warriors who track down terrorists and try to spare civilians, while Palestinians possess a single-minded commitment to war.
Mr. Stillman's austere, dignified performance is enlivened by appealing touches of dry humor, while Ms. Ripley's Mary is depicted as both a nervous shopaholic and a troubled but humane woman who visits wounded soldiers incognito.
While this may be true, it is also conceivable that DARPA may use the findings of the BRAIN project to tamper with soldiers' memories and humane feelings on the battleground to desensitize them in such a way that would increase their killing power.
All the worse for Trudeau that he's the one who will have to pay politically for the way Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Harper all mishandled their responsibility to ensure Khadr's humane treatment as a child soldier and a Canadian citizen.
However, we see a grenade lobbed into a ditch, and five injured Taliban are killed off in, as one of the soldiers later says, "the most humane way possible".
Roberts's descriptions of soldiers and officers are masterly and humane, and his battlefield set pieces are as gripping as any I have ever read.
Names both stood for the individual soldier and, correlatively, pleaded for a more humane approach to battle, which is to say they gained both literal and symbolic value.
Melville's skew of things doesn't look like an accident: in the early sixties, the president of France, Charles de Gaulle, was actively working on achieving reconciliation with (West) Germany; by suppressing the faces of German soldiers arresting Jews and instead showing only the most humane of German soldiers speaking and acting in close-up, Melville was contributing to that cause.
