Miller first intended to write about cowardice, a subject that most of us intuitively understand. We can identify with the Confederate soldier’s response to flying bullets and exploding shells at Antietam: “How I ran! Or tried to run through the high corn. . . . I was afraid of being struck in the back, and I frequently turned half around in running, so as to avoid if possible so disgraceful a wound.” More difficult for us to grasp is the captain in Vietnam who, as described by an infantryman, “charged a Viet Cong soldier, killing him at chest-to-chest range, first throwing a grenade, then running flat out across a paddy, up to the Viet Cong’s ditch, then shooting him to death.” Later, the captain says to the infantryman: “I’d rather be brave than almost anything. How does that strike you?”

Miller kept finding himself drawn from the Confederate to the captain, from natural self-preservation to seemingly unnatural valor, and so he decided to write about courage. A law professor at the University of Michigan and the author of An Anatomy of Disgust (1997), he attempts to cover the entirety of the vast topic, including moral strength, civility, chastity, and the courage of the terminally ill, but it is his battlefield ruminations that prove the most compelling.

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