Having focused on the historical experiences of American prisoners of war in previous works, Doyle (history, Franciscan U. of Steubenville) here shifts his focus to how American agents, both military and civilian, have treated their own enemy prisoners of war and other conflict-related detainees from the American Revolution to the present day. Although the central focus is on the relative humaneness or cruelty of how prisoners were treated in different conflicts, he also discusses how the cultural and legal circumstances of a particular conflict impacted the nature of prisoner treatment. His treatment is relatively comprehensive, covering all of the expected prisoner of war populations, as well as the perhaps less expected topics of Loyalist and Quaker prisoners during the American Revolution, Native Americans as POWs, the Spanish American War and the War in the Philippines, domestic internees during World War II, the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and prisoners of the "War on Terror." Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)