WHAT could have been yet another academic exercise from a university sociology department is saved by the diversity of experiences and reactions to the traumatic effects of war from the responses of interviewees which make up the core of this book.

There is also a doubting humility on the part of its author who asks: “Can social science expect to reveal anything significant about the human experience of war?”

Kristen Renwick Munroe’s efforts are undeniably fruitful in bringing together these self-revealing experiences including those of a woman old enough to remember the 1915 Armenian genocide, survivors of the Nazis, fighters and others involved in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Japanese internees in US WWII camps and escapees from civil wars, revolutions and tyrannies in Iran, Kenya and Uganda.

The aim is to analyse as far as possible the variety of ways in which people can retain their humanity and identities, having undergone the brutalising savagery imposed by conflict.

Despite the complex multiple and intertwined reactions, patterns — sometimes contradictory — do emerge, as with two US GIs in Iraq.

One, a video war-games addict, simplistically clings to the belief that US efforts were designed to liberate Iraq and bring democracy, while the other regards them as being related to the greed for oil. The author leaves any deduction of ignorance versus intelligence for the reader to assess.

There is a resilience acquired by those able to defuse their persecution, enduring suffering and human rights abuses, by recognising that they are part of a larger group “with whom they could connect psychologically.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan Gikuyu novelist, caught up in the 1950s Mau Mau struggle against colonial rule, claims a shared language as a bonding and resistance force enabling people to face and survive oppression.

Among other factors contributing to survival the book examines are the place of hope that drives people to face any danger to find a better world — relevant today to the thousands of despairing refugees facing almost certain disaster in the Mediterranean — fatalism and, significantly, luck.

The interviewers never pose leading questions but allow the responses to be as open and honest as the interviewee wishes.

In a book providing no conclusive answers, merely tentative insights, Monroe notes “the limitations in comprehending another’s reality.” But, in stepping back and listening to these stories, gathered so randomly, “we are struck by the contrast with the many books written by the policy-makers, the old men who start wars.”

Review by Gordon Parsons