From Publishers Weekly
The noted left-liberal public intellectual Schell copes with the trauma of September 11 and the Bush administration’s militarized response in this hard-hitting collection of essays, reprinted from Schell’s "Letter From Ground Zero" columns in The Nation. The selections, which are arranged chronologically, cover the period from the terrorist attacks to March 2004, and the author’s tone correspondingly shifts from shell-shocked foreboding ("we seem to be gliding in a glassy calm toward a multitude of horrors") to increasingly exasperated denunciations of "the brutal, unilateral, hegemonic war" in Iraq. Schell made his name as a reporter in Vietnam and later penned the anti-nuclear weapons manifesto The Fate of the Earth, and it is through these two lenses that he views the current crisis. Many of the essays harp on what Schell deems the wrong-headedness and hypocrisy of Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, which Schell contends encourages nuclear proliferation in countries like North Korea and Iran rather than curbing it. Meanwhile, his sharp-eyed analysis of the deepening quagmire in Iraq notes that, as in Vietnam, the original discredited rationales for war are being abandoned for an imperialist logic of "credibility." Schell’s preoccupation with themes of nuclear annihilation and the folly of empire give the essays a grim, at times apocalyptic mood-"a monster, driven mad by righteous fury and dizzy with its own power, is rising out of the ashes of September 11 to bellow destruction to the world"-only occasionally lifted by hymns to the anti-war movement and calls for nuclear abolition. But his many prescient observations-"countries that aren’t into nation-building are ill-advised to get into nation-toppling," he wrote, when Operation Iraqi Freedom was but a gleam in Donald Rumsfeld’s eye-lend credence to a challenging critique of American policy.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Jonathan Schell wrote wise and passionate words that appeared in The Nation. From these words blossomed a regular column by the former New Yorker writer on the new American way of living, dying, and killing. Fierce and elegant, infused with Schell’s typical compassion, these meditations were incisions into the received wisdoms of post-9/11 America. Drawing from historical precedents to comments on the current political and cultural situation, Schell presents compelling arguments against America’s imperial ambitions, explores the dangers posed by the resurgence of nuclear proliferation, and argues that the public can and must hold their leaders accountable for their actions. As Schell warns, “Attention must shift from the deceiver to the deceived. The corruption threatens to spread from the teller to the hearer—from the Administration to the country, from them to us. Today's lies, exaggerations, contradictions and broken promises litter the mental landscape, like uncollected garbage, polluting and poisoning the intellectual and moral air. A fog of amnesia covers the scene. What was said ten minutes ago is forgotten. What was promised yesterday never appears, and no one cares ... Cognitive torture calls for cognitive indignation. And indignation should lead to action.”
