Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War - Softcover

Danner, Mark

3.93

108 ratings by Goodreads

9781568586359: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568586353 ISBN 13: 9781568586359

Publisher: Nation Books, 2011

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Drawing on rich narratives of politics, violence, and war from around the globe and written by one of the world's leading journalists, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter century. From Iraq, the Balkans, and Haiti, to America's "black sites" around the world, Danner reports on our "grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams."

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About the Author:

A former staff writer for the New Yorker, Mark Danner contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. The recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, he teaches at Berkeley and Bard College.

From The Washington Post:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Susie Linfield

Like Goldhagen, journalist Mark Danner is outraged by the large-scale destruction of human beings. Danner's new book, "Stripping Bare the Body," contains long dispatches that delineate the agonies of Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. But most readers will be primarily interested, I think, in his writings from, and analysis of, the war in Iraq. Danner's prose is usually cool and lucid, though it occasionally lapses into melodrama ("The first time I was killed, or nearly so . . ."). And though Danner is morally rooted in a hatred of war and injustice, he repeatedly skewers the idea that American power can remake the world. Against the "ambition and grandiosity" of the Bush Doctrine in Iraq, for instance, he puts forth the virtues of "the modesty of containment."

Yet Danner, too, runs into problems. All of the pieces in "Stripping Bare the Body" were previously published as contemporaneous reports, which means that the book resembles a jigsaw puzzle that the reader must assemble. This is not always easy. During the Bosnian war, Danner was a fervent interventionist, railing against the cautious Powell Doctrine of national self-interest and "fear of entanglement," which he regarded as forms of appeasement. (He compares Warren Christopher to Neville Chamberlain.) In the case of Iraq, however, those principles look much better to him. This is justifiable; many, though not all, of the journalists who passionately urged the United States to fight Milosevic later passionately urged the United States not to fight Saddam. But a coherent explanation as to why Danner took such different positions is needed; "Stripping Bare the Body" contains no such overarching chapter.

The hero of Danner's book is the late diplomat George F. Kennan, father of the containment doctrine. (One piece begins, somewhat implausibly: "In the ruined city of Fallujah . . . I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan.") Yet it is not at all clear how a containment strategy could work against al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups -- groups that, Danner admits, have "mutated into a worldwide political movement" that transcends national boundaries and, in the process, have carried terrorism "to a level of apocalyptic brutality that the world had not before seen." It is a flaw of his new book that Danner fails to adequately explain these contradictions. It is a strength of his new book that, after reading it, one wants to hear more.--bookworld@washpost.com

Copyright 2010, The Washington Post.

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