Book Review By Jonathan Liu
Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism
By Michael Burleigh
Harper, 577 pages, $29.99
Nearly a decade has passed since this country declared war on terror, and still, I’m afraid to report, the definitive history of modern terrorism remains to be written.
But that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. Whatever consolation it provides Michael Burleigh—or his American fans, who’ve waited over a year for the British historian’s latest to make it to our shores—the failures of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism are sins less of omission than questionable inclusion. If you could scrub the grime of sweat and snark off its pages, all 577 of them, you’d uncover a survey, perhaps a tenth shorter, of impressive scope and verve. Such an abridgement would demonstrate that 25 years in print, on television and behind lecterns have made Mr. Burleigh, above all else, a craftsman. It would show a master weaver at his hand loom, crossing disparate threads of fact and argument (the lack of original research and reliance on secondary sources become moot here) to form a single intricate fabric stretched across the long 20th century, from the discovery of “dynamite terrorism” among Irish-nationalist “Fenians” in the 1880s to the internecine rivalries besetting today’s various extant Al Qaedas.