Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War - Hardcover

Winslow, Philip C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807050040 ISBN 13: 9780807050040

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1997

Synopsis

A foreign correspondent surveys the enormous human damage done by the millions of anti-personnel land mines in scores of countries around the world, detailing the lives of the victims and assessing the ways the mines might be removed.

About this title

About the Author:

Philip C. Winslow has worked as a foreign correspondent for numerous news organizations, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Macleans, and CTV News. He lives in Boston and London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A globe-trotting journalist's harrowing rundown on the horrific toll taken by land mines long after the wars during which they were laid have ended. Drawing largely on his own experiences in Angola, Winslow provides both big-picture perspectives and anecdotal evidence on this ghastly threat afflicting much of the Third World. All told, roughly 110 million mines (anti-tank and anti-personnel) remain buried in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Israel, Korea, Mozambique, Somalia, Vietnam, and scores of other countries. Every year, these devices kill or maim 26,000 people, virtually all of them civilians. Worse yet, the lethal legacy continues to grow; guerilla forces are laying one million new mines each year, according to UN estimates. Thanks to their capacity to channel and contain enemy troops in combat zones at a comparatively modest cost, land mines have become weapons of choice for regular and insurgent armies. But as the author explains in his reportage on clearance crews dispatched by humanitarian organizations, it's a lot easier and cheaper to put sensitive packages of explosives below the surface of the ground than it is to remove or disarm them. Nor, as he documents in bleak detail, are the doctors and nurses posted to battlegrounds by private relief agencies able to do much more than perform basic amputations for those who survive a land-mine blast. Covered as well is the indifference of corrupt governments to the plight of innocents crippled or dismembered by accidental detonations, the dearth of crutches (let alone prosthetics) in areas where the need is desperate, the chilling effect of live minefields on once-bustling population centers, and the emergent Canadian-led campaign to ban the use of land mines. An eloquent case against ordnance that was characterized by no less an authority than William Tecumseh Sherman as ``not war, but murder.'' (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0807050040
• ISBN 13: 9780807050040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 167