It's icky to review negatively a book written by someone who chose to go through experiences that I would never dare. Still, I thought Christopher Hedges was ineffectual at delivering his core argument that ethnic wars are manufactured by elites and propagated by thugs, leaving individuals and societies physically and morally crippled in their aftermath.[*] This feeling was especially evident when the passages he quoted from other writers were more compelling than his writing. A paragraph or a page that appears in one chapter could seamlessly be placed in another chapter because these chapters lose their coherence after the first two pages. Sandwiched between the generic, broad-stroked claims about the nature of war and nationalism are gripping eyewitness accounts from his time as a war correspondent. These were the kind of passages I chased after as I flipped another page. But it feels perverse of me as a reader to wish to be entertained by other's war stories.

Part of me wonders if the incoherent writing--with sometimes conflicting claims--is deliberately intractable as a metaphor for the psychological effects of PTSD. And that would be all right because why should writings about war be straightforward? My grumbling might be more a reflection of my creativity as a reader than it is about Hedges' skill as a writer.

[*]: In the international relations discourse on nationalism and ethnic conflict, one of the thematic questions is whether nationalism is a top-down phenomenon or a bottom-up one. Hedges's claim is similar to John Mueller (2000) "The Banality of 'Ethnic War'", which argues that ethnic war is neither top-down nor bottom-up but a playground of local gangs and thugs.