Just Beneath the Soil

Clint Smith continues his exploration of public memory and trains his expert eye on a new time period: World War II. With his poetic, effortless prose, he brings us along as he interrogates what it means to have a 'Western perspective' on the most consequential and brutal global event of the past century.

He spends time with one of the last Navajo Code Talkers, a survivor of the infamous boarding schools for Native children. He sits with the still-living Korean "comfort women" who were subjected to sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military. He remembers his great uncle, a Black American veteran who signed up to fight for a country that subjected him to racial terror. He asks, why do we lift Germany up as an exemplar of remembrance for their willingness to build memorials, monuments, and museums dedicated to the Holocaust? And should we?

As with everything he writes, accessibility to a broad audience and intellectual rigor are his goal. Clint puts it best: 'I wrote it for the 15-year-old version of myself. This book represents a new way of thinking about the greatest conflict of the past century, and provides new eyes through which we might collectively understand it.'