My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front - Hardcover

Raban, Jonathan

3.79

29 ratings by Goodreads

9781590171752: My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590171756 ISBN 13: 9781590171752

Publisher: New York Review Books, 2005

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Ranging from Seattle to Cairo, from the high seas to the US presidential campaign, Raban brings a distinctive and often unexpected perspective to the issues facing post-September 11 America.

What does the "war on terror" and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds, as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity.

Raban reflects on the Bush administration's manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East, and explains the region's shifting and complex loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism: the tendency of Americans to be inspired by a religious fervor oblivious to history and reason. And he explores the increasing polarization of American politics, as exemplified by the issues that he has seen divide his urban from his non urban neighbors in the Northwest.

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From the Publisher:

"IF your library consisted of nothing but books whos subject is how America has responded to the attacks, your shelves would hold dozens, perhaps already even hundreds of volumes. This surfeit of musings raises the bar on any book that takes the post-9/11 world as its subject. Raban clears that bar...[He is] quite clear-eyed and precise about the nature, roots and dangers of Islamic fundamentalism...He understands the rituals not only of the extremist but also of the devout Muslim...Has it occured to any other post 9/11 belletrist to note the similarities between [Sayyid el Qtub] and T.S. Eliot? If that thought intrigues you even while angering you a little, you are a Jonathan Raban's kind of reader."--The Washington Post

About the Author:

Jonathan Raban is the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines. In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.

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