Books Reviewed by Robin Kirk
- While They’re At War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront
- Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw
- The Man Who Tried to Save the World, a Biography of Fred Cuny
- The Paradise Located in Nowheresville
- The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber
While They’re At War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront
By Kristin Henderson
(Houghton Mifflin, 317 pages)
Reviewed by Robin Kirk
published in the Raleigh News and Observer, Sunday, February 19, 2006
Gov. Mike Easley calls North Carolina “the most military-friendly state in America.” The reason is obvious. Fayetteville’s Fort Bragg is the nation’s largest military base. When its soldiers are added to the number of reservists and military personnel elsewhere, the state’s military residents total more than 100,000.
The military’s economic impact is just as evident. Almost 20 percent of the Americans sent to Iraq to fight deploy from North Carolina, and many leave families here who live, shop, study, worship and work among us. On their Web sites, the bases emphasize how much cash they pump into the local economy. Just one, the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, estimates that it generated $1.16 billion in economic activity last year.
The costs to North Carolina — in higher-than-average rates of domestic and child abuse, prostitution and addiction, among other ills — go unmentioned. As difficult to discern in the boosterism is the emotional toll war takes on military families.
Already, the “war on terror” has lasted longer than the United States’ involvement in World War II; deployments are more frequent and, with the “stop-loss” order in effect, longer than ever. Military families exist in a kind of limbo, dreading loved ones’ deployment or fearing their death, each news cycle potentially carrying the worst possible news.
As of last week, more than 2,500 American service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to CNN. Even families lucky enough to throw a welcome home party know soldiers can return physically or emotionally crippled.
Of course, the travails facing warrior families are an ancient story. The Greek poet Homer made Penelope a heroine for skillfully discouraging new suitors for the 10 years it took Odysseus, her husband, to return from the Trojan War.
Yet author Kristin Henderson makes the case that for Americans, the all-volunteer force we now send to combat is new and brings with it “potentially ominous” implications. For the first time in our history, most Americans lack what she calls the “visceral connection to our forces that comes with a draft.” At a time when the “war on terror” seems potentially endless, only warriors and their families experience “the day-to-day sacrifices, small and large, that war requires.”
A vivid and often emotionally charged description of those sacrifices is the heart of her book, “While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront.”
A journalist and the wife of a Marine chaplain, Henderson writes as an insider and outsider, someone who can describe her own struggles as a soldier’s wife even as she turns her reporting skills on the military and spouses now treading the same path she is.
Henderson intersperses her reflections with the lives of two women whose husbands were deployed to Iraq in September 2002.
Marissa Bootes and Beth Pratt never envisioned becoming military wives. The Pennsylvania daughter of a Vietnamese father and German-American mother, Bootes was a free spirit before marrying her high school sweetheart, Charlie, and bearing a daughter. Charlie’s decision to enlist after Sept. 11 led them to move to Fort Bragg, where Bootes found work at a law office.
Pratt, a divorcee, met her future husband just after his enlistment. Like many volunteers, Luigi was not drawn to the thrill of combat. He saw the army as a way to lift his immigrant family out of poverty. As the death notices in the newspaper reveal, most enlisted personnel are not privileged or highly educated. They come from what Henderson calls the “upwardly mobile working class,” high school graduates from small towns, decaying urban areas and minority and immigrant communities.
Once their husbands go to Iraq, Bootes and Pratt are lost in the maze that faces families left behind. Henderson describes the emotional pitfalls families experience during a deployment as well as the dangers of any return home, when a soldier discovers that life has somehow percolated on without him.
The book is a useful handbook for such families as well as the Americans who want to know how to help.
Unlike in previous wars, soldiers can remain in close and even daily touch with home. But even e-mail and blogs can’t prevent a roadside explosion or mortar attack.
In her most moving pages, Henderson tells the story of Melinda Ferrin, whose husband, Clint, kept in frequent touch via telephone from his unit’s base in Iraq. Still in the glow of his last call, Ferrin woke to a knock on the door. She thought it was the baby sitter arriving early. Instead, uniformed soldiers waited on her doorstep. It was the nightmare visit. Her husband was dead and, as Henderson writes, Melinda “was no longer a wife.”
Henderson’s reporting skills are formidable. Bootes and Pratt (whose husbands returned safely) and the obstacles they overcome are rendered in fascinating detail. Interestingly, Bootes remained an avid supporter of the war while Pratt went public with her opposition.
Yet there is a musty feel to both women, as if the author had plucked them from a 1950s casting call. Both have careers and aspirations but are willing to uproot and bend their lives for their men. More similar than different, they agonize over bills and separation, child care and home repairs. While real, these concerns are as perennial as the shroud Penelope weaves during the day and unravels at night to trick her impatient suitors. Bootes and Pratt might as well wear aprons, pumps and pillbox hats.
What is more interesting to me, peering in from the outside, is how the contemporary tumult of how we live changes these ancient stories.
How do fathers, for instance, cope with the absence of the women warriors they married? And what about gay partners submitting to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule or the experience of National Guard families, who risk their loved ones and face economic ruin because of prolonged deployments? Reservists and National Guard troops now make up 40 percent of U.S. fighting forces in Iraq, and many of these “volunteers” and their families have effectively been drafted.
Just as glaring is the absence of race in the book. Rarely does Henderson even allude to a reality that defines American life. Nor does she address the increasing role played by private companies, such as the North Carolina-based Blackwater USA. Their employees can be killed alongside soldiers, but what special teams or support services minister to their loved ones?
For me, perhaps the biggest gap in the book was Henderson’s failure to finish her own sentence and spell out why she thinks a volunteer force is so potentially ominous. She leaves it hanging in the air, like the last word in a familiar saying.
I can’t help but supply it, since it is as obvious as North Carolina’s love affair with the military.
If no politician sends a daughter to battle, no titan of industry fears that knock at the door and most of us, the people, are well-insulated from loss, we can overlook the human cost of war. Volunteers are, after all, volunteers. They accept the risks and, people may conclude, must face the consequences. As a result, wars may become easier to start, more frequent and more difficult to end.
We are left with the old story, the one Homer told, of the young and beautiful marching to war and many fewer, newly wise and changed, ever returning.
Author Robin Kirk is the director of the Duke Human Rights Initiative.
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw
By Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001
Reviewed by Robin Kirk
published in the Raleigh News and Observer
Medellín is a well of desire. Its slums perch on steep Andean slopes, staring down at the opulence of the flats. Violating the rule in Latin America, the poor live high and the rich live low. The steeper the street, the more desperate the desire. The people staring down at the swimming pools and the Ferraris don't hate the rich. They want to be them. Along Medellín's shopping avenues, you can buy designer labels - just the labels, mind you, carefully trimmed - to whipstitch into your wardrobe.
Born in Medellín, Pablo Escobar learned this lesson early. His grandfather smuggled a Colombian homebrew known as tapetusa in empty coffins and hollowed eggs. Escobar followed in his footsteps by smuggling cigarettes, liquor, clothing and household appliances. Then, a friend told him about cocaine. It was easier to haul and generated fabulous profits.
In Killing Pablo, reporter Mark Bowden writes about Escobar and the hunt that led to his death, presenting it as one episode in the continuing soap opera of America's war on drugs. For Bowden, Escobar's genius was not innovation - cocaine was already being imported to the United States when he financed his first kilos - but savagery. Escobar would do anything, absolutely anything, to win. "He wasn't an entrepreneur, and he wasn't even an especially talented businessman. He was just ruthless. When he learned about a thriving cocaine processing lab on his turf, he shouldered his way in. If someone had developed a lucrative delivery route north, Pablo demanded a majority of the profits - for protection. No one dared refuse him."
By 1981, Escobar had killed and threatened his way to the top. U.S. authorities detected only one in every hundred inbound cocaine flights. A plane could take as many as 400 kilos of cocaine a trip. At five flights a week, that meant over $2 billion a year, a fifth of Colombia's annual exports, right behind oil and more than the value of the country's entire annual coffee harvest. Escobar was king, El Patrón, the Boss.
Bowden's last best seller, Black Hawk Down, told the inside story of how eighteen American soldiers perished in Mogadishu, Somalia. Bowden, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, uses a similar narrative technique in Killing Pablo. Others have chronicled in better detail Escobar's fabulous wealth, shocking violence, and the destruction produced by his obsession with converting his fortune into political power. Where Bowden excels is in describing how shadowy American teams helped track Escobar down and kill him in 1993. In doing so, he exposes one of the ugliest truths about America's effort to stop drugs at the source. Billions of dollars have been spent seizing cocaine and eliminating traffickers like Escobar, yet with little apparent effect on the amount, price, or purity of the drugs reaching the United States.
For Colombia, the truth is grimmer. One of the key forces allied with the Americans to bring Escobar down was a rival cartel, which grabbed Escobar's routes before his body was cold. Bowden shows that "killing Pablo" has had no lasting effect on the amount of illegal narcotics sold on U.S. streets or the violence that now claims over 3,000 Colombians a year.
Based on fresh research and hundreds of interviews, Bowden reveals how U.S. military and intelligence agencies used sophisticated surveillance techniques to track Escobar. A top secret U.S. Army team known as Centra Spike used Beechcraft airplanes packed with specialized equipment and ground-based teams to locate Escobar. Then, they passed the information to the Colombian police in hopes that the police would kill him.
Qualms were few. During his career, Escobar had ordered hundreds killed, placed dozens of bombs in crowded cities, and even brought down a commercial jet, killing all on board. Bowden makes the Americans into clean-cut good guys. He admires the technological know-how and can-do convictions that were used, displaying a Tom Clancy-like gusto for the hardware and hard-body values.
Bowden isn't as interested in the broader implications of America's role in the hunt for Escobar, which is a pity. Twisted motives and hidden alliances are the key to the story, not Yankee ingenuity or muscle. In the end, American technology proved remarkably ineffective. The fat, arrogant, lazy, pot-smoking, sly, and vicious Escobar moved in Medellín like it was his own boudoir, gleefully slipping from house to house while changing cell channels and verbal codes.
It finally took other drug lords to run Escobar down. His rivals in the city of Cali bankrolled a group that called itself People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, PEPEs for short. Bowden explains how the PEPEs implicitly coordinated with the Americans. But Bowden is too cautious for my taste in interpreting the import of the relationship between the PEPEs and the United States. The PEPEs erased Escobar's hiding places far more thoroughly than Centra Spike and should get equal credit for his death.
To anyone reading the daily news, the law of unintended consequences for hunting Escobar down seems as glaring as America's continuing love affair with illegal narcotics. One of the PEPEs, Carlos Castaño, now leads Colombia's paramilitaries. He is waging the most brutal war in the hemisphere, ostensibly against leftist guerrillas, but actually on thousands of defenseless civilians. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency claims Castaño continues to traffic, using his fabulous profits for Uzis and mortar rounds.
Killing Pablo is a gripping autopsy of failure. Yet Bowden seems oddly unwilling to draw any conclusions, using the book's last lines to muse that the final meaning of Escobar's death is unknowable. It's as if Bowden spent all his time stringing dates and conversations and radio waves in chronological order, but never stepped back to ask why we should care.
The Man Who Tried to Save the World, a Biography of Fred Cuny
by Scott Anderson
Doubleday
Reviewed by Robin Kirk
published in the Raleigh News and Observer
The sight of refugees trudging across our television screens is as familiar as the nightly weathercast. The context hardly matters. What most people see is hunger, fear, and hopelessness.
What Fred Cuny saw was opportunity. The subject of this fascinating, heart-wrenching biography, Cuny was one of the world's most innovative humanitarian aid workers until he mysteriously vanished in Chechnya in 1995. For him, traditional relief was flawed by "do-gooders," a pejorative term he used to refer to groups that bring food and blankets, but exit once the crisis dissipates, leaving the roots of disaster to fester until the next hurricane or war brings them to bloom. He believed that calamities compel the international community not only to save lives, but also to fashion long-term improvements for survivors.
Author Scott Anderson, a journalist specializing in covering wars, believes Cuny's interest in trouble began with a childhood fascination with the World War II aura of setting the world right. Cuny was mortified when the Marines rejected him because of poor academic performance. He found a new calling after volunteering to fly aid into Biafra. In 1971, Cuny launched Intertect, a for-profit company that specialized in the risky business of relief to the world's trouble spots.
Cuny shopped himself to international organizations as a consultant ready to fly at a moment's notice, earning a reputation as the "Master of Disaster." In 1976, after an earthquake in Guatemala left 28,000 dead and much of the Mayan highlands in ruins, Cuny helped design camps to hold one million refugees. His mission "was not just to replace homes destroyed...but to employ building techniques that would make those replacements much safer." Instead of using outside engineers, Cuny trained local builders in earthquake-safe techniques. Illiterate workmen received manuals based on pictographs printed on plentiful coffee sacks.
In 1993, George Soros hired Cuny to run a privately-funded relief program in Bosnia. Soros wanted to take the "opportunity" of Balkan fighting to remake society into a more democratic system. His involvement marked a new age of disaster relief, when private individuals and organizations wield as much or more power than nations.
Cuny built the water system that kept Sarajevo livable during the worst of the fighting in 1993 and 1994. Before Cuny's arrival, hundreds of Sarajevans were killed by Serb snipers while fetching water. Cuny bluffed and bullied all sides into allowing him to revive the abandoned water system, thus eliminating the Serbs' murderous diversion and keeping Bosnia a viable political entity.
Anderson also covers Cuny's flaws. He was a terrible father and prone to inflating his accomplishments. His close relationship with militaries, in particular the Americans, provoked speculation about his motives.
Anderson theorizes that Cuny was a "danger junkie," bitten by the "adrenaline-kicking excitement that life is somehow made richer and fuller by the ease with which it might end." His ambition and sense that he was invulnerable to danger both served and damned him. On his final and apparently fatal trip into Chechnya, Cuny ignored multiple and serious signs of danger, thus putting not only his life at risk, but also the lives of his translator and the two doctors who also vanished with him.
Anderson tests the competing theories about Cuny's disappearance with a mystery writer's skill for suspense. Was it a Russian plot, a Chechen mistake, an attempt to shield nuclear warheads? One question Anderson leaves unanswered is what, overall, did Cuny accomplish with his disaster-as-opportunity approach. Certainly, he saved lives; yet the potential of remaking society remains starkly unfulfilled. Political absolutes still trump good intentions despite Soros' billions and Cuny's innovative energy.
The Paradise Located in Nowheresville
By David Sinclair
Reviewed by Robin Kirk
When the icy wind howls at my window, spitting at my fire so its flames leap, I love to curl up with a rousing good story -- especially one about fraud and fake countries, sea voyages, skin diseases and men in feathered hats.
You too? Well, I have the book for you.
"The Land That Never Was," by English journalist David Sinclair, tells the story of Gregor MacGregor (deliciously, this was the man's real name) and his fabrication and sale in the 1820s of the entirely fictitious country of Poyais.
Tales of confidence tricksters, while painful to those who fall prey to them, are reliable favorites for storytellers. But this saga has particular resonance today, when so many of our corporate titans are engaged in rank chicanery. Beautifully written, the book satisfies on every level.
Its epigraph, from "Peter Pan" author J.M. Barrie, sets the stage for an introduction to MacGregor: "There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make." MacGregor was born in 1786 to a family with a storied past, but little cash. Like many ambitious boys then, he left school at 16 and joined the British Army. The experience was valuable, literally. As Sinclair writes, officer duties at the time "required meticulous attention to detail, the ability to collect, absorb and communicate vast amounts of information, and inexhaustible patience. These were attributes that would be extremely useful to the man who would go on to invent an entire country, together with a sophisticated system of administration for it, and succeed in persuading large numbers of people to accept it as real."
In terms of fighting, MacGregor was more interested in the spiff of his uniform than deeds of daring. Eventually, he was booted from his unit and had to shop his services to South Americans fighting Spain. Having adopted the title of "Sir," MacGregor hitched to one of the most celebrated generals of the time, Sebastián Francisco de Miranda, who lived on the lavish scale that the Scot aspired to.
Sinclair skewers some of the icons of Latin American independence, among them the fickle and possibly psychopathic Sim-n Bol'var, who took to MacGregor as a kindred spirit. In 1812, for example, Sinclair recounts how Bol'var slipped out of the hopelessly besieged town of Puerto Cabello without informing his soldiers, leaving them to merciless blades of the Spanish king's army.
Nevertheless, MacGregor returned to England penniless in 1821. As capital, he had the glamour of his largely faked exploits, a silver tongue and a Tolkienesque talent for conjuring up landscape. MacGregor styled himself the "Cacique of Poyais," a made-up Central American nation, and began selling land to settlers desperate for a fresh start in the New World.
MacGregor knew how to bait a hook. Among the elements he used to convince investors was a 350-page guidebook, maps, labor contracts (he "hired" clerks and doctors and shopkeepers and farmers and lawyers and a banker and even a manager for the nonexistent theater), testimonials from people who claimed to have spent time there and even Poyaisian "land offices" in British towns.
In the age of CNN and the Internet, such fraud is unthinkable. But at a time when Spanish America remained largely unknown to Europe's working class, yet cloaked in legends of gold, MacGregor's scam tale went down as smooth as lager.
As Sinclair writes, MacGregor had chosen his moment well. Britain craved a slice of the Latin American pie. With Spain's grasp weakening and the United States making belligerent sounds about its "sphere of influence," British banks were anxious to stake a claim. At the time, London was the world's financial hub. English bankers lent President Thomas Jefferson the $15 million he needed to make the Louisiana Purchase. There was a feverish and largely unregulated trade in commodities, securities and the like.
Gran Colombia was the first South American nation to float a loan issue on the London exchange. This was Bol'var's short-lived union of what later became Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Then came Chile, then Peru.
"The city could hardly contain itself," Sinclair writes. "Brokers, jobbers and members of the public were so desperate to lay hands on the bonds that there was a near riot at the Royal Exchange." For Sir -- then General -- Gregor MacGregor, "the timing could hardly have been better."
Hopes couldn't have been higher in March of 1823, when the second ship carrying Poyais settlers appeared off Nicaragua's pestilential Mosquito Coast. Even the captain of the Kennersley Castle was a believer. Upon reaching the spot on the map where there should have been St. Joseph, the thriving capital of Poyais, he found not a single ship -- or boat or canoe or house or even dock. Thinking the map wrong, the captain ordered the vessel carefully into a lagoon.
After more than a day's wait, the passengers saw some bedraggled figures. To their dismay, these were survivors of the first Poyais-bound ship, the Honduras Packet. The news only got worse. Few could afford the costly trip back, since they had sold all of their possessions to buy a one-way ticket and a share of Poyais land. Some were elderly or unskilled in the hard labor it took to beat back the jungle. Disease and exposure began to take their toll. What had appeared to be ample supplies dwindled.
Sinclair quotes one settler, James Hastie, who in his memoirs described how a search party returned with only "two puncheons of rum, which, according to Hastie, 'was scarcely a mouthful for us, although some spirit was absolutely necessary to correct the quality of the water, which we got out of the sand.' "
Amazingly, even after the survivors returned to England months later, some continued to believe MacGregor, blaming corrupt middlemen for their travail. All told, 180 settlers and their children died, either in the missing Poyais or after they were evacuated to Belize.
Once the fraud was discovered, MacGregor and his family fled to Paris, where he attempted (with little success) to sell the French on the same scheme. For his fraud, he spent only a brief time in jail. Eventually, poverty compelled him to appeal to the Venezuelan government for the military pension he was owed for fighting in its war of independence. There, he was treated with respect as a returning war hero and he died in Caracas in 1845.
Later, the name Poyais became synonymous with greed, gullibility and fraud, used by wits in plays and books that both skewered and celebrated MacGregor's exploits. I doubt that a single soul was ever saved from ruin by such cautionary tales, though. As current scandals show, credulity is as persistent a human trait as avarice. With more than a century's worth of cushion, at least the tale of MacGregor and Poyais makes for a delicious story.
The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber
by Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg
Reviewed by Robin Kirk
In the gallery of 20th century horrors, the Nazi stands beside the dictator, the military junta, the religious fanatic and the ethnic warrior. Each has a unique place in the history of how human societies turn murderous. But to my mind, no figure provokes more incomprehension that a recent addition: the suicide bomber.
What is unique about the suicide bomber is not the part about dying in order to kill. The technique is centuries old. The term "assassin" derives from an ancient Islamic cult whose members stabbed their rivals in broad daylight, accepting that they would be struck down in turn. At the losing end of World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots gave up their lives to crash into Allied ships.
What’s new is who is involved on both sides of the equation. Both the victims and the attackers are civilians (at least until the bomber straps on explosives). While suicide bombers try to kill members of a certain group - Israelis or Iraqi Shia, for example — they also murder their own kind without hesitation. The bombers are strangers to their victims. Finally, the bombers and the victims are no one special (at least outside of their families). In that, suicide bombings are more akin to an American phenomenon, now thankfully rare: the lynching.
So how does it happen that these young men - and now women – come to choose their fate? In their problematic, but worthwhile book, “The Road to Martyr’s Square,” Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg explore the world that creates the suicide bomber. Their aim, as they write from the outset, is not to explain the "mind" of suicide bombers. Rather, they set out to examine how it is that extremists have managed to convince so many Palestinians to sacrifice their lives and kill innocents.
The point here is essential, but easily overshadowed by the horror of these acts. A suicide bomber is not, as Oliver and Steinberg convincingly demonstrate, created with a few fiery speeches, even when they are combined with the crushing desperation of the Occupied Territories. Neither is it an endemic Palestinian or even Middle Eastern trait.
During a six-year stay in the region, Oliver and Steinberg collected a treasure trove of materials used by the radical Islamic group known as Hamas and rival factions, showing how the suicide bomber is an intricate, painstaking creation, a product of a vast cultural engine of propaganda, myth-making, religion, ideology, technology and art. While the extremists who create suicide bombers are a miniscule group, their power is magnified through the deliberate use of culture to create a supply of fresh recruits.
The authors started by collecting graffiti, then moved on to paintings, poetry, t-shirts, song recordings, photographs, video and "martyr cards," slips of paper celebrating a successful bombing with photographs of the bomber. “You could ride forever through the towns and villages of the Bank and Strip and never see anything like “David loves Jenny,” they write. Some of the rhetoric dated back to the Palestinian revolts that preceded the foundation of Israel; but other phrases and images were new, like photographs showing one early bomber as “a sex symbol – a romantic figure, at the very least, larger than life.”
As Sinclair writes, MacGregor had chosen his moment well. Britain craved a slice of the Latin American pie. With Spain's grasp weakening and the United States making belligerent sounds about its "sphere of influence," British banks were anxious to stake a claim. At the time, London was the world's financial hub. English bankers lent President Thomas Jefferson the $15 million he needed to make the Louisiana Purchase. There was a feverish and largely unregulated trade in commodities, securities and the like.
This message is not on the fringe, but quickly entered the mainstream. On Palestinian state television, young men are lured with promises of the hur, the “beautiful virgins of Paradise promised to martyrs, as if they were commercials or public service announcements.” Instead of avoiding the grisly realities of what explosives do to the body at close range, graffiti revels in it. In 2002, militants added a twist when the first woman detonated a suicide pack. Since, mothers and fathers have been added to the long list of human explosives.
Alone, this propaganda machine would not alone create a bomber. But harnessed to the other factors, it has proved one of the most destabilizing forces in the world today.
Oliver and Steinberg’s achievement in this book is to make that case, and for the first time in book form to publish some of their collection. It makes for fascinating, if sickening viewing. There are the faces of suicide bombers superimposed on flowers; graffiti of the names Fatah and Hamas shaped into assault rifles; and stills from video reenactments of the brutal murders of kidnapped Israeli soldiers.
Extremists also chronicle how they punish and even kill "collaborators," Palestinians accused of helping the Israelis or of criticizing the extremists’ methods. Perhaps there was a moment, a “tipping point,” when other Palestinian voices could have detoured this rush to death. But as Oliver and Steinberg write, the advantage went to others, like Sheik Ahmad Yasin, the Hamas founder, and even Yasir Arafat, who near the end of his life also approved of the use of suicide bombers.
The authors returned to the United States with their archive. Crammed into an apartment, it was difficult to live with. "The large canvases created a violent dreamscape above the bed, exploded busses oozing blood and body parts, while beneath peaked cardboard boxes crammed with martyr cards and photographs of gaping wounds. If they had seemed odd in Jerusalem, they were downright sinister in Boston."
That power, though, complicates and ultimately garbles the book. The writers, so eager to describe the tangled world they document, are ultimately unable to filter it. At times, the book reads like a madcap adventure through the Occupied Territories. Then it veers into a Tolkienesque explication of the genealogies of terror, dull as a dissertation. Especially in the second half, the book pages seem strung together like a first draft of an over-long magazine article mistakenly filed with a professorial job talk. As I finished, I wondered if the material might have been better packaged as images paired with less verbose text.
In the end, the authors prescribe no cure. Their point is to force us to look closely at images and ideas that most people find abhorrent - and avoid. Yet if we are ever to address this phenomenon, we must first understand it and understand how societies can come to accept and promote it. For every individual who opts for a bomb, there must be dozens standing in front, leading the way.
Writer Robin Kirk directs the Duke Human Rights Initiative