ISBN-10: 156858413X | ISBN-13: 978-1568584133 | Publication Date: October 13, 2009 | Edition: First Edition
For the past two decades, Mark Danner has reported from Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans, and the Middle East. His perceptive, award-winning dispatches have not only explored the real consequences of American engagement with the world, but also the relationship between political violence and power. In Stripping Bare the Body, Danner brings together his best reporting from the world’s most troubled regions—from the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti to the tumultuous rise of Aristide; from the onset of the Balkan Wars to the painful fragmentation of Yugoslavia; and finally to the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the radical, destructive legacy of the Bush administration.
At a time when American imperial power is in decline, there has never been a more compelling moment to read these urgent, fiercely intelligent reports.
from the Foreword by Louis Begley, author of Wartime Lies, About Schmidt and Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters “The publication of Stripping Bare the Body is a timely act of public service and a literary event, bringing together Mark Danner’s luminously intelligent and engaging narratives and stories from the world's war zones…they are both a moral history of America’s engagement with the world over the last generation and an account of a twenty-three years’ journey through hell on earth by an ideal observer: Danner is endowed with a passion for truth, great physical courage, a muscular writing style, and a heart as big as a barn.”
Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What "There's probably no one alive who understands political conflict and upheaval better than Mark Danner, and there is almost certainly no one who writes more eloquently about it. Stripping Bare the Body is an unmitigated masterpiece of reporting and analysis."
Michael Pollan, author, The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food “The publication of Mark Danner’s Stripping Bear the Body is a big deal -- an event. Why? Because Danner’s writing over the past three decades, taken together, forms a definitive, and absolutely riveting, chronicle of the dark side of the post-cold-war world, from Haiti to Abu Ghraib and beyond. No other writer we have combines brilliant and courageous reporting with brilliant and courageous political and moral thinking as Danner does. He is also, first and last, a breathtakingly good writer. For anyone who cares about the fate of our foreign policy and our republic and, indeed, the human condition, Stripping Bare the Body is a touchstone book. “
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains "Mark Danner has truly chronicled what Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, called 'the dark places of the earth,' some of which are uncomfortably close to home. He has returned with tales to tell that are vivid, eloquent, heartbreaking and show a steady moral compass. This extraordinary book will long endure, and should be bedside reading for President Obama."
Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism "With this vivid and deeply disturbing book, Mark Danner affirms his standing as our preeminent guide to the world's broken places, littered with the detritus of American carelessness and delusions.”
Ron Suskind, Pulitzer-prize winner and author, The Way of the World “Mark Danner is leading journalism's improbable Renaissance -- showing, page after page, that the elegantly reasoned argument, supported by indisputable facts and presented with passion and ingenuity, can still hone ideals into a sharp sword of action. This book is must-reading for anyone who hopes to understand our era of peril and possibility.”
About the Author
Mark Danner was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker and contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. The author of The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, and The Short Way to War, he is the recipient of a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco and New York City.
For more information about Mark Danner, please visit his website at http://www.markdanner.com
Mark Danner is a writer, journalist and educator who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, Balkans and Iraq, among many other stories, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the late Cold War and afterward, and about violations of human rights during that time. His books include Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travel's Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004) and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and Humanities at Bard College.
Mark David Danner was born at Utica, a small city in northern New York State, on November 10, 1958, the son of Dr. Robert Danner, a dentist, and Rosalyn Sitrin Danner, a high school Spanish teacher. Raised in Utica and in the Adirondack mountains, Danner attended John F. Hughes School and Utica Free Academy, where he served as co-editor of The Corridors, which was named, his senior year, the best student newspaper in New York State. He was graduated in June 1976.
Danner entered Harvard College in September 1976. After majoring, successively, in philosophy, English literature and religion, he took his degree in Modern Literatures and Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary honors concentration that combined comparative literature, philosophy and art history. He found himself particularly marked by an individual tutorial on the development of modern fiction with Frank Kermode, then visiting Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and by a class in international relations taught by Stanley Hoffmann and Guido Goldman. After spending a year traveling in Europe, Danner was graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, in June 1981. In September 1981 Danner began work at the New York Review of Books as an editorial assistant to editor Robert B. Silvers. In 1984 he became senior editor at Harper's Magazine and, two years later, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics and wrote pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Danner joined The New Yorker's staff in April 1990, five months after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter At Large: Beyond the Mountains" -- and a few days after the articles were granted the 1990 National Magazine Award for Reporting.
At The New Yorker, Danner began contributing regular essays to the "Comment" section of the magazine, notably on the Gulf War. On December 6, 1993, for the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article -- Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote." That article, an investigation into the notorious massacre in a remote Salvadoran town, was granted an Overseas Press Club Award and a Latin American Studies Association award. In April 1994, Vintage published Danner's book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. The New York Times Book Review recognized The Massacre at El Mozote as one of its "Notable Books of the Year."
During the mid-1990's Danner began reporting on the wars in the Balkans, writing a series of eleven extended articles for The New York Review of Books, which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe" and concluded with " Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory," (New York Review, July 15, 1999). The articles were recognized by the Overseas Press Club as the "Best Reporting From Abroad of 1998." Metropolitan Books will publish an adaptation of these pieces in a volume entitled, The Saddest Story: America, the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World. Danner also co-wrote and helped produce an hour-long television documentary for ABC News's Peter Jennings Reporting series: "While America Watched: The Bosnian Tragedy," which aired on March 30, 1994 (and which was awarded an Emmy and a duPont Golden Baton). He later co-wrote and helped produce a second documentary for the same series, "House on Fire: America's Haitian Crisis," about the run-up to the United States' occupation of Haiti, which aired on July 27, 1994.
Danner's writing has appeared in Aperture, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Times Book Review, and on The Times Op-Ed page. His 16,000-word essay, "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in World Policy Journal (Fall 1997) provoked a prolonged exchange of letters and responses from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Congressman Lee Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan. Danner has appeared widely on television and radio discussing international affairs, including on Charlie Rose and The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, CNN's PrimeNews , ABC's World News Now and C-Span's Morning Show, among many other programs.
In 1998, Danner began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights. In 2000, Danner was named Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley. He currently spends half his year at Berkeley, where he teaches courses on political violence, crisis management in international affairs and writing about wars and politics. In fall 2002, he became founding director of Berkeley's Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, leading a series of debates and discussions on foreign affairs, journalism and politics. In 2002, Danner was named Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York State and in 2007 the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities. At Bard he teaches courses on literature, intellectual history, foreign affairs and politics.
Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001 and later began speaking out extensively about the Iraq War, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others. He reported on Iraq for The New York Review of Books and wrote a series of essays for The Review on the emerging torture scandal that came to be known as Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he collected these essays and gathered them, together with a series of government documents and reports, into his book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. Torture and Truth was awarded the 2004 Madeline Dane Ross Prize from the Overseas Press Club for best book on current affairs. In May 2005 Danner wrote an essay for The New York Review accompanying the first American publication of the so-called "Downing Street Memo," the leaked minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials discussing the coming Iraq War. The essay provoked a number of responses and led to two subsequent essays, all of which were collected, along with relevant documents and a preface by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, 2006 in The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.
In March 2009, Danner published an essay in The New York Review, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites", which revealed the contents of a secret International Committee of the Red Cross report based on testimony from "high-value detainees" in the "War on Terror," who had been captured, held, and interrogated at secret US prisons--the so-called "black sites". Shortly thereafter, he published a second essay, "The Red Cross Report: What it Means" and released the full text of the report on the The New York Review website. Weeks later, in a move senior Administration officials claimed was prompted by the disclosure of the Red Cross material, President Obama ordered released four Justice Department memos in which the Bush administration purported "to legalize torture."
In October 2009, Danner published Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, a large book whose title was inspired by the observation of a former Haitian president (overthrown in a military coup) that "political violence strips bare the social body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin." The book contains political reporting on wars, revolutions and other forms of violence from around the world, including the aborted election in Haiti, the genocidal civil war in the Balkans, and the invasion, occupation and counterinsurgency in Iraq, along with much writing about the war on terror and the torture of detainees. Danner's work has been honored with a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2006 he was awarded the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association to honor that year's "major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics." In 2008 he was named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome. Danner speaks French and some Spanish. He serves on the board of the World Affairs Council of Northern California and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Century Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Danner divides his time between San Francisco and New York.
This review is from: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (Hardcover)
Seeing Mark Danner in conversation with Bill Moyers inspired me to read his book, Stripping Bare the Body. In a quiet and deeply informed way, Danner pulls apart the threads of America's various foreign interventions of the past 25 years, from Haiti to Bosnia to Iraq. In each case he shows us the complexities of the local reality and how American foreign policy interventions got it all wrong. The usual scenario is action based on misinformation and/or support for the villain in power who promises us whatever he thinks we want to hear. In the general outline of the story, Danner uses more current interventions to relate what some of us have been hearing since the early 1950s. But his journalism has taken him deep into these places, often to where his life was on the line, so he shares details of each place that are new and that bring into sharp relief the larger policy questions. In this he reminds me of Rory Stewart's brilliant narratives about Iraq and Afghanistan.
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This review is from: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (Hardcover)
I too became aware of Stripping Bare the Body by way of an hour-long discussion devoted to it on the excellent Bill Moyers' Journal -podcast from USA PBS. So I was prevented from being put off either by the somewhat obscure title or the sheer size of the book: 563 pages of real journalism for various heavyweight New York magazines from Mr Danner's reports from trouhle zones around the world. Readers will note that sections of the book, published in 2009, have also been published previously under their own cover.
Beginning in 1989 with an account of his first visit to Haiti when he was just 31, the book falls into four - not three - separate sections covering events in Haiti, Bosnia Herzegovina and finally, Iraq. The third section, called Marooned in the Cold War which in my view would alone be worth the price of the book, contains his reflections on the faltering steps being taken by Western - specifically American - diplomatic minds to try finally to come to some sort of accommodation with the world after the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall. Danner traces the determination of America to remain the world's preponderant power from 1945 and the creation of NATO in 1949, to its decision in the late nineties to march east. `We have chosen to do for Europe's east, what NATO did for Europe's west,' declared the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1997, `to integrate new democracies, eliminate old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery and deter conflict.....' Danner is aghast at the degree of hubris and ignorance on display. He goes on to reflect on how and when the USA first became `the indispensable nation.' Throughout the 19th century, he points out, while the US was busying itself in its own continent, it was Britain's Royal Navy, pursuing its own preoccupations; protection of worldwide trade routes and the balance of power in Europe,which maintained the order that now the US struggles to maintain.
Danner has no time for President Wilson. He illuminatingly describes Wilson's first encounter with the Old World at Versailles in 1918 as `one of great set pieces of history' `While we were dealing with momentous questions of land and sea,' said Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, `He was soaring in clouds of serene rhetoric.'
And it was rhetoric which trapped Clinton as the Yugoslav war unfolded. Danners's chapters are a marvellously detailed tutorial on the action, reaction and inaction, hopelessly confusing to people like me at the time, as we watched just a little of the human misery and suffering rolling out day by day from our television screens. Now I realise we didn't know the half of it. His chapters on Iraq cover ground made more familiar by reporters like Bob Woodward, George Packer and Anthony Shadid on whom he draws freely. However he has the benefit of a great deal of published reporting, both official and unofficial, on the subject of the US treatment of prisoners and torture which he pulls together in an unflinching condemnation of an Administration which allowed itself to be driven to such lengths in pursuit of a victory which still eludes its successor.
Danners's writing is detailed, urgent and well researched. But it isn't perfect. He has a penchant for long sentences which sometimes defeat eye and mind. One such, which there is no space to quote, runs to 12 lines - 83 words.
But Stripping Bare the Body is a valuable work which should have a place in sixth form and University libraries everywhere. Oh - and the title? It comes, we read, from Haiti. `Political violence strips bare the social body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin'. That comes from the President of Haiti in 1987 - and he should know. Worth bearing in mind as the mills of 24 hour news spin on day after day and the post cold war world slouches menacingly ever closer.
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This review is from: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (Hardcover)
This guy is wise, and he brings you the news so you don't have to (go to these hellholes for yourself). Veteran reporter calls it like he sees it, and the literary quality is outstanding.
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