Davis doesn't isolate the nature of the car bomb itself from the bombing stories themselves and I think misses the chance to write a much better book; this would have been better organized if he'd separate the technical aspects of the history of car bombs from the sketched history of resistance: how one group that used car bombs was related to another, the various conflicts, and the movement from anarchism and warfare (New York and Saigon 1920-1955) to urban terrorism.
The theme of the book, the car bomb as the "poor man's air force," gets lost in the details: Davis devotes a chapter early to the concept, and mentions it again late, but the basic idea of the car bomb as the equalizer between occupier and occupied doesn't hold up since the various conflicts don't always have that structure.
I'm glad and relieved to be done with this book.
One closing note: I'm baffled by Davis's treatment of Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American as a piece of straight reporting. This was an odd editorial choice and suggested to me that Davis isn't overly concerned with facts qua facts, but rather considers what he has to say to be "more true" than the facts he uses to decorate his arguments.
Next up is probably a Deborah Lipstadt book on Holocaust deniers, but I found a copy of Davis's book No One Is Illegal, so I need to give it a look too.
1 comment:
I suggest you start with History on Trial: My Day in court with a Holocaust Denier.
Deborah Lipstadt
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