The New Criterion

“The War”? Which war? What about the war? The grandiose titles of Ken Burns’s multi-part and seemingly interminable documentaries-cum-marketing opportunities— “The Civil War,” “The West,” “Baseball,” “Jazz”—all irritatingly raise similar questions by their self-important refusal to qualify themselves except by reference to the name of their author, the celebrity documentary-maker Ken Burns. That name is the answer to all the questions raised by the title. Oh, the Ken Burns war. Viewers may or may not have been aware before its seven two- or two-and-a-half-hour installments aired on PBS in September and October that there had been an armed conflict between the years of 1939 and 1945, a conflict which in America is usually called World War II, but Ken’s war was not that war. Most of the fighting and the sufferin ...

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