Given his pacifist perspective, you might expect Noah Richler’s new book about Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan to be a rant. Or one of those “important” books that attract high-powered reviewers, so you can get by with reading reviews. Not so. What We Talk About When We Talk About War is an eloquent meditation on the nature of modern warfare, and one of the best books I’ve read about Canada in years – not the surprisingly colourful, forgotten history of, but a biting analysis of who we are in the twenty-first century, and why.