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James Carroll's "House of War" is ostensibly a history of a single American government building, that five-sided behemoth that sits across the river from Washington and is instantly recognizable to just about anyone in the world as the headquarters of the United States military. But if Carroll's book actually reads like something much bigger than that, like a story not just of the Pentagon but of the last half-century of American foreign policy, well, that's the point. "The Pentagon has been so much at the center of national life that one could write an entire history of the contemporary United States in its terms," Carroll argues in his prologue. That's just about what he does.
Carroll is a novelist, but he's best known for two massive works of nonfiction -- "Constantine's Sword," which examined the Catholic Church's troubled history with Jews, and "American Requiem," a memoir about how the Vietnam War ruined Carroll's relationship with his father. Carroll, who is a former Catholic priest, and whose father was an Air Force general who worked in the Pentagon, is thus fond of personalizing history, and "House of War" runs along the same lines. As a kid, Carroll would slide down the Pentagon's slick floors in his socks while his dad worked late in a coveted E-ring office. As an adult, he sees that something much less fun occurred in those halls -- the Pentagon's militaristic, coolly efficient bureaucracy swallowed up the American government and its people, he says, making war the constant order of our lives.
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