I have to agree with you, Alan. I don't think Danny of Tupelo read the same book as the rest of us. I found the reviews on Amazon.com by Blight of the Washington Post and particularly a customer dubbed "steefin" to be more on the mark. The book urges its reader to take a deeper look and actually think, to stop taking the easy road of so many so-called scholars who blithly find the war and its causes to be starkly black and white (no pun intended).

I have always appreciated the term "overdetermination" and find it extraordinarily applicable to our favorite subject. While the concept originated in a psychological concept, Althusser applied it to social context: "Althusser used the idea of overdetermination as a way of thinking about the multiple, often opposed, forces active at once in any political situation, without falling into an over-simple idea of these forces being simply “contradictory.” This seems to be the goal of Ayer's book, a goal well worth striving to attain, and, for those willing to read with a more open mind, the book helps broaden one's view of this amazingly complex scenario. The reverse has been frustratingly true, even at the "scholarly" level, for far too long.