Summer here has turned hot and it is good to finish a difficult read, "Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West", by Cormac McCarthy.  I was led to read it because Harold Bloom had named it the best American novel ever written.  In matters of reading Bloom knows just about everything.  

The book is graphic and unsparing in its bloody history of the southwestern US.  I think he does capture much of the ground/foundation of our United State, and points to the roots of current violence.  Some of the roots anyway.  The "judge" at times tips his hand in philosophical interludes:

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade waiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

And then he finishes the section with "war is god."

Instead of a full review I offer the best off the web.  There is a new online journal, Archipelago that published_an_article by Katherine McNamara entitled, "The Only God Is the God of War, On Blood Meridian, an American Myth."

Mythic indeed.