Customer Reviews

Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

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Something that I haven't seen in any of the reviews of Vollmann's book is this: "Am I going to want to read it?" After all, if you're spendng $120 or so on the thing, and you're interested in more that just looking at it on your bookshelf, it should be considered. Sure, Vollmann has written an important book by all accounts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to read it. Or even a quarter of it.

Well, good news: Rising Up Rising Down is very readable; moreso I think that his recent novel Argall, on which I remain stuck on around page 350. The book does get heavy of course in its theories and efforts to explore the connections it needs to make. But the chapters themselves are usually very short, and few examples in it last so long that you lose interest. A few more pages and he'll be talking about something else in a different country and different time. I raced through the first volume, and half of the second. At that point I got sidetracked with some other things, but I can't wait to get back into it.

In many cases you actually get nice short versions of difficult to understand historical events. For example, one hundred pages on what happened in the early Soviet Union when farms were turned into state owned collectives and the famine that resulted is actually much easir to read than a 500 page book on the topic, Frankly that's enough for me, and if I want to know more about it beyond that, Vollmann gives me a list of plenty of other books to check out on the topic as well.

I'll leave it to others to go into the strengths and shortcomings of this book. What I wanted to do here is just encourage people who are on the fence about buying this thing to not be discouraged by its length or topic or bewildering talk of Vollmann's "moral calculus." It is in fact a very interesting read, and the fact that you learn a lot at the same time hasn't hurt me a bit.

The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -Vollman's label for the ethical analysis of violence - is clearly necessary, but the biological realities of violence always seem to render the sterile rationality of philosophers irrelevant. Determining when violence is and is not morally justified is such a difficult task that it is tempting to just dispose of the question, taking refuge in absolutist positions like pacifism or Kissingerian realism. As a result, worthwhile contributions to the practical ethics of war are few and far between.

This is the best attempt to reason through the moral problems of violence since Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and it improves on that flawed work in every way. Vollman's analysis is not limited to nation-states, he distinguishes between just and unjust regimes, he does not assume that there must be a binary moral value to every act of violence, and he knows when to conclude that a moral problem is insoluable.

Vollman passes judgment confidently when it is called for, but he has a healthy respect the lesser of two evils, the exigencies of war, and the pressures of decisionmaking in violent situations. He makes objective moral judgments, but they are clearly informed by his own subjective encounters with violence and death.

That said, this book has a lot of problems. First off, Vollman is clearly a thrill-seeker. When he talks about packing a handgun in Golden Gate Park or smoking crack cocaine, he reveals a very unusual attitude toward death. We should be suspicious of the moral handwringing of anyone who has deliberately seeks out violence. When he recounts the deaths of his colleagues while he was a reporter in the Balkans, I find myself wondering if this was not another "limit experience" that he actively chased. The experience of an aspiring novelist-DETERMINED to find abysses to gaze into-is just not comparable to that of the Somali and Sarajevan civilians who had no choice but to passively endure extreme violence.

The other big problem with this book is the lack of structure and logical rigor. If you have read any of his fiction, you know that this is just how Vollman's (brilliant) mind works, but this book suffers for it. It's a sustained meditation on violence, not a work to which the reader can refer for moral guidance in a specific situation. But it's still the best contemporary work in an otherwise empty field and very much worth reading.

I have to admit that I felt daunted by the seven volumes of this book and bought the abridged edition. It is astounding! What I found most valuable is not the specific rules Vollmann lays out for deciding whether violence is justified or not, but the detailed and thoughtful examinations of specific historical events and people: the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia; Napoleon, Stalin, Gandhi, and, most importantly, ordinary people who were victims or perpetrators of violence. Vollmann's writing is precise and eloquent and carries you so seamlessly from one page to the next that you don't realize until it's too late that you've reached the end of this 700-page volume. (And then you feel compelled to get your hands on the unabridged edition.) This is an immensely useful and revelatory book.

My experience reading RU&RD was more conventional; I read the volumes straight through. I have 2 hours of commuting on the subway each day so I get a lot of reading done. I started in May and finished volume seven in August with one month off while I was on vacation. I never found it tedious or repetitive. If one topic did not particularly excite me he would be on to another in 5 or 10 pages.

The binding and slipcase is gorgeous. When my copy first arrived the slipcase had been damaged, but McSweeney's shipped me a new case free of charge- and I didn't even buy it from them.

The only thing I can add which has not been covered by other reviewers is the photography. Vollman includes a couple dozen photos in each volume- i believe all of which he shot himself. They include shots of a friend of his who had just been killed by a sniper, a woman in columbia pointing to a bloodstain where her daughter was slain, child soldiers in Burma. I found the photos helped reinforced the reality of the exotic and often novelistically rendered personal experiences he offers in the second half of the book. I really enjoyed them.

The other thing I find amazing is that Vollman is working on another seven volume book about the 'symbolic history of north america.' I would have thought this would be considered a lifes work.

THis book was receommended in a blog that was debating the morality of force when collateral damage to non-combatants was a real possibility. To my shocked surprise, I found an intense, serious study of violence, freedom and "urgent means" (a euphemism for 'when nothing but force will do'). This is a single volume abridgement of a huge set of books and tends to be wordy and academic in places but well worth the time invested in reading. Examining the use of force in situations ranging from Napoleon to Stalin to the US War Between the States, the author explores the question of under what circumstances the use of violence may be justifiable. Even the advocates of non-violence such as Gandhi are not neglected in the discourse. There are no easy answers here and some of the discussion is frankly disturbing (as it should be, given the subject) but it is a masterful examination of why humans kill and the "moral calculus" they use to justify their actions.

Originally I was going to buy the seven volume version but then I became intimidated by the thought of spending that much time and energy on one book. Then when I discovered the abridged version I quickly bought it - but again became intimidated, not sure why - maybe by the seriousness of the subject matter. This book sat on my "too be read" shelf for a long time.

What took me so long to start?

This is a terrific book and it deals with a subject we all should be thinking about - violence. When is it justified? etc.

Vollman raises some terrific points and his desultory but in depth approach is a joy to read (although the style and format lends easily to skipping about).

After finally reading this book I am now planning on trying to find a couple more used copies to give to friends (because I know that if I give it to anybody they will hold off on starting it just like I did).

Also - I am keeping my eye out for a used copy of the seven volume version (now out of print) which has regrettably become very expensive (it was $75 new - now it is a couple of hundred used!)

It's not as if I'm now going to read the gigantic version cover to cover - but I *would* like to skip around in it. There are several sections that are not in the abridged version that I'd like to read - and the author made sure to put an annotated table of contents of the seven volume version at the end of the abridged version with the goal of tempting people like me to move on to the full version - Mission Accomplished!

I have the revised edition (which is availble remaindered at the Barnes and Nobles in my areas for ten bucks), and I can see from the progress I have made in it that it is an extremely important work and might unlock some of Vollman's other work. However, I have some reservations; the abridgement does not seem like it was what Vollman wanted, and some of the cuts leave a disjointed feeling. I have found that I can skip around in the book without losing the meaning, and the arguments do not seem to develop from the first page to the last, but gradually throughout the book. I am reluctant to invest in the seven volume set, but I would like to see an abridgement that is more considered and smooth. Vollman states that he abridged "for money"...when he does it for love of or respect for his readers I think this will be his masterpiece. As is, it is very very good but somehow lack cohesion.

I am roughly halfway through this tome, and I am happy to report that Vollmann's poetry is in full force here.

Vollmann's work is expensive, sprawling, beautiful, and sterilizingly heavy. It's historical analysis, personal anecdote, philosophical inquiry, ethical manifesto, war journalism (his), photography and drawings (mostly his), and thumbnail illustrations. And it's worth the price to get one of the few remaining sets. You'll become intimately acquainted with Trotsky, Cortes, Lincoln, Plato, John Brown, Stalin, Leonidas, Gandhi, the Unabomber, de Sade, Hitler, Montezuma, the Ik, Napoleon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others. Will you run across an occasional typo or forced metaphor? Sure. But considering the product, who cares? It's brilliant and very, very readable. Two things particularly please me about this work. First, Vollmann never pretends to objectivity. RURD is an "essay" in the original sense of the word, and provokes plenty of discussion. Second, McSweeney's typography and binding are breathtaking, so that each volume is a pleasure to see and hold, much less read. If you enjoy the abridgment, the set is worth all 50,000+ pennies, or whatever the last sets are going for.

Read it awhile back and can't write anything very useful, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and applaud the effort.