A narrow but useful look at terror.
Novelist (Killing Time, 2000, etc.) and military historian (The Devil Soldier, 1991, etc.) Carr evaluates terror as a tactic, with an eye toward the US response to Osama bin Laden.
The lesson of terror, the author posits, is straightforward: it doesn’t work. Although terrorism seemed shockingly new on September 11, Carr argues that it’s but a variation on an old theme. Americans were quick to proclaim the attacks “acts of war,” and it is through this lens that Carr views terrorism. It is, he suggests, simply another way that warring parties have targeted noncombatants—a practice as old as war itself. More important, terrorism is a practice based on a misconception. Rather than intimidating an enemy into submission, it builds resentment that can last for generations. Carr offers many examples: Roman massacres of Germanic tribes under Augustus led to the raids by those same tribes nearly 500 later; William Tecumseh Sherman’s willingness to let northern troops plunder southern houses made reconciliation more difficult; and Israeli paramilitary groups inspired Palestinian terrorist organizations. The analysis is focused and evenhanded—each example demonstrates that terror leads to more of the same. Nor does Carr exempt the US from his critique. American policy, he claims, has often advocated civilian death in pursuit of its goals, and he cites the use of atomic weapons on Japan, napalm in Vietnam, and airstrikes in Kosovo. Carr, of course, is not the first to critique such methods of war, and he is as concerned with intellectual responses to what the Romans termed “destructive war” as he is with examples of its use. The problem is that he fails to consider the essence of what it was that troubled thinkers like Augustine and Hobbes. To both, wartime atrocities pointed to something more than a flaw in military strategy; terror was and remains a tactic that pushes the boundaries of reason: it is the point at which military objectives blend with bloodlust.
A narrow but useful look at terror.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50843-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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