What’s the (noncrass, noncommercial) point of collecting war essays? Vindication? That would presume an argument ever ends. Artifact? Histories do a better job. Voyeurism? No, the point has to be recontextualization. We compile and reexamine war essays to learn what an old crisis can say about a present one. Mark Danner, one of the finest war essayists working, offers something even rarer in Stripping Bare the Body, a collection that builds a critique of the American view of war through aggregation, connecting the horrors of the world that the essays seek to rectify.

The book’s reportage is