About Netsurfer Books

Netsurfer Books is a bi-monthly e-zine offering short reviews of books and related items. We include listings based on recommendations from our staff and reviews from other individuals. Are we bribed to include any of these items? No. Do we receive a commission if you purchase an item through one of the links included here? Yes. Are we waiting to hear from you about what you'd like to see reviewed? Definitely.

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Terrorism and Kids: Comforting Your Child

Terrorism and Kids: Comforting Your Child
Fern Reiss
Peanut Butter and Jelly Press, LLC; ISBN: 1893290093 (Sept 2001)

The 48 pages of this sadly useful little work are just about right. We're much inclined to recommend Carole Marsh's The Day That Was Different: September 11, 2001: When Terrorists Attacked America. The bright, almost chirpy, cover doesn't inspire much confidence, but look beyond it to its ultimate audience. This is a book written with children in mind. It gives the day historic context with references to other attacks heard 'round the world, proving life goes on. It also gives reassurances about the role of governments in protecting their citizens. Islam and tolerance are among the topics, too. It invites children to ask questions and express their fears, getting them out into the open where they can be dealt with honestly. Marsh has a long history as an educational writer and the wide range of supporting material that she's gathered here speaks well of her skills and how well she understands her young audience. While Marsh's book has clear direction as a tool for caregivers outside the home, parents might be interested in help that addresses their concerns specifically. Terrorism and Kids: Comforting Your Child is a compassionate guide to helping your kids come to terms with events. Among other things, it cues parents to the nonverbal signals that children may use to either show or hide their distress. Sadly, we think these books will be needed again. Parents and other caregivers should also keep in mind that images coming out of Afghanistan have included horrific pictures of children caught in the endemic culture of war and the hot war that's raging now. These surely can't reassure those little souls sleeping just down the hall from you.

BIOGRAPHY, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY

One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001

One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001
Life Magazine
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316525405 (Dec 2001)

Living through the trauma of September 11 and its aftermath somehow doesn't make us real witnesses to history if Day of Terror: September 11, 2001 is any indicator. Evidently rushed into publication, this slim volume runs an economical 48 pages. The only other titles attributed to the author are a handful of state travel guides. If you're looking for a souvenir on a par with Discovering Oregon, look no further. But, you only need to glance at the editorial review to get a sense of the graceless prose that fails its subject. If you're looking for a remembrance equal to the task, you'd be hard pressed to improve on One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001. Life magazine is among the most experienced chroniclers of the world's high and low moments, in no small part because its editors possess some of the keenest and most sensitive eyes for eloquence in photography and the written word.

Understanding Terrorism and Managing the Consequences

Understanding Terrorism and Managing the Consequences
Paul M. Maniscalco and Hank T. Christen
Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0130212296 (July 2001)

While most of North America has gone about its life mostly oblivious to threats, other countries and people have lived and worked with the possibility of terrorist activity for years, even decades. Some people have observed the world more closely and have chosen not to be complacent. It's hardly surprising then, that there's actually a fairly deep repository of information available today. Among the latest publications is Understanding Terrorism and Managing the Consequences. Maniscalco and Christen understand that response is no substitute for defense or prevention, but when response is your only alternative, it needs to be effective. Even an event that produces little in the way of immediate destruction can trigger massive disruption. (Witness the scope of the anthrax scare.) This book is a resource for community planning. How well is your community prepared?

Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future

Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future
Clifford E. Simonsen, Jeremy R. Spindlove
Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0023017317 (1999)

Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future is more of an academic reference, an arm's length analysis of the practice of terrorism. It won't help you understand current events, but it will help you understand the human and governmental impulses behind them. This work clearly produced as an introductory student text, probably for an advanced high school or a Terrorism 101 course. That's not to say it's simplistic. It certainly understands terrorism's origins and its track better than most of us do. We won't dismiss a course text, either. They served us well in university and we still consult many of our old books regularly. But, you should understand that Simonsen and Spindlove are writing about the phenomenon of international terrorism, not about the politics and personalities that drive today's events.

Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence

Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
Mark Juergensmeyer
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520232062 (Sept 2001)

Why do humans' darkest impulses invade our most transcendent experiences? Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence doesn't content itself with the targets most on our minds right now. The University of California Press has placed on its cover a stolid Timothy McVeigh squarely beside fiery Osama bin Laden. McVeigh, from most accounts, was described as undistinguished and rather pleasant. Current propaganda demonizes bin Laden, but we've seen nothing to suggest that his mission - however contrary it is to our own experience - is fueled by anything but sincere fervor. What do we make, then, of what we perceive as dissonance between fervid religious belief and strategies of destruction and murder? Where is the fracture between faith and empathy? How does love of God manifest itself as a hatred of humanity? And why? Updated and released just ten days after the American crucible, this is the book that we think if a must-read for everyone hungering to understand the world - some of closer to home than we'd wish.

Pakistan: Flawed Not Failed State

Pakistan: Flawed Not Failed State
Dennis Kux
Foreign Policy Association; ISBN: 9991083642 (2001)

Crucial geographically and politically in the fluid coalition of states pursuing al-Queda and its sponsors, Pakistan remains a cipher for most outsiders. Really, beyond its dispute with India and its nuclear capability, did you really know anything about the country? Two months ago, could you have pointed it out quickly on a map? And, would you have named it as one of the extremely rare friends of the Taliban? Do you assume it to be an ancient culture, or do you know that it dates back to only the mid-20th century? How was it aligned during the Cold War - or, locked in conflict with India, was it also unaligned, like India? Author Dennis Kux puts Pakistan in perspective in Pakistan: Flawed Not Failed State. America's newest bestest friend in South Asia is, unexpectedly, Pakistan - but is the US repeating its Cold War strategy of sacrificing other countries to corrupt dictatorships in pursuit of its own interests, the very same strategy that's come back decades later to haunt it repeatedly? We should be older and wiser now, especially with the best lesson right across Pakistan's border. If we are older and wiser, does it help?

The Price of Terror: Lessons of Lockerbie for a World on the Brink

The Price of Terror: Lessons of Lockerbie for a World on the Brink
Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060197617 (October 2001)

When Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie in 1988, it took 270 to their deaths. Earlier this year, a British court has secured a guilty verdict against one of the bombers. Since the time, but the United States long ago named Libya and, specifically, Muammar Ghadafi as authors of the man-made disaster. Thirteen years after the crime, it can only be cold comfort for families of the victims. These families and these circumstances were different, though. The Price of Terror details just how different. Despite the lack of a legal precedent in national or international courts, the families banded together to seek compensatory and punitive damages from Libya for the results of its state-sponsored terrorism. This book is an account of the long battle to win not just compensation but, first, the right to seek that compensation. Ghadafi has said that the January conviction closes the book. No, says the United States. It stays open until he accepts responsibility.

Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism

Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism
John K. Cooley
Stylus Pub Llc; ISBN: 0745316913 (2000)

The politics of Afghanistan could hardly be more tangled. Taliban supporters and its fractious dissenters are firing on each other and foreign troops with armament sold or otherwise provided decades ago by the United States, Israel, Russia, Britain, and France (to name a few). The country has been an enthusiastic importer of raw materials like disaffected fundamentalists, milling them into deadly terrorists ready for worldwide export. Superpowers manipulated and abandoned men with relatively petty local ambitions, somehow generating in them grandiose schemes of global destruction and the total re-invention of the world in their image. Foreign policy has had it share of failures, but in this region it's gone cosmically awry. Afghanistan must be the worst-case scenario for learning from those mistakes. John Cooley's Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism traces the ingredients.

War in a Time of Peace

War in a Time of Peace
David Halberstrom
Scribner; ISBN: 0743202120 (2001)

David Halberstrom is the author of The Best and the Brightest (20th anniversary edition, 1993), a seminal account of how America slid down the slippery slope into Vietnam. Halberstrom has many strengths as a historian and storyteller, but his greatest must certainly be his ability to marry the influences of events and people. A character study is, to him, as important as that character's decisions. Given Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and the suits who cast opinions and votes, America's role in Vietnam seems almost preordained. Equally, with the Cold War behind it, America expected different things of its leaders. It expected disengagement; disengagement it got. In War in a Time of Peace, Pulitzer winner Halberstrom looks at the best and the brightest of this new generation, shaped by both events of the past and expectations in the present. After demanding influence throughout the world, America turned inward, only reluctantly going into places like Somalia and Kosovo. Halberstrom's book was released just at the cusp of the attacks, and the effects of disengagement in Afghanistan in particular don't take center stage. But, the observations and history are profoundly instructional.

Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War

Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War
Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad
Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 0684871580 (Sept 2001)

While we were putting together this issue of Netsurfer Books, we were struck by the timeliness of most titles. Many, in fact, come from September, and were obviously on the press only weeks before September 11. Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War is a case in point. Sometimes, after reading a whole book, we find that a single isolated idea takes hold and defines the book for us. In the case of this book, the idea was one that we knew very well, but that we'd managed to push to the edges of our consciousness - when were conscious of it at all. It's the notion that biological warfare is somehow a focused attack. After all, in all the movies, isn't the McGuffin always a tiny little shining vial? We wish! There's tons of the stuff out there and more being made daily. What made us imagine that, whether the source is foreign or domestic, it wouldn't actually be used?

The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda

The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
Edward S. Herman
South End Pr; ISBN: 0896081346 (1998)

In both Netsurfer Science and Netsurfer Education, we referred readers to sources on analyzing propaganda, in particular because we would see a lot of it over the coming weeks and months from all the players in the conflict. Kids are learning critical thinking in schools today, being taught to look behind the advertising and hype thrown at them all the time. Adults, though, still resist those very same lessons in evaluating political and social messages. Edward S. Herman is one of America's most interesting critics, a student of the dissonance between gloss and meaning, of national self-deception. He takes to heart Senator William Fulbright's assertion that "To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment". Herman's mission is to urge Americans to see their country clearly. In that mission, he pulls no punches, detailing how government decisions, news spin, media outlets and corporations shape citizens' perceptions and opinions with tools as sophisticated as glittering generalities and more lowly, but related, name calling. Herman is the author of 1998's The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda and Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, and co-author of the classic Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

NONFICTION

Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterroist Unit

Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterroist Unit
Charlie A. Beckwith
Avon; ISBN: 0380809397 (2000)

The story of Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterroist Unit is told by the late Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the imposing Green Beret who created it after his experiences in Vietnam. He was forced from its ranks following the spectacular and embarrassing failure of the Iran rescue mission, only four years after he'd earned official go-ahead to create the unit. Given to political gaffes and plain speaking, Chargin' Charlie was colorful in his own right. His outspoken criticism of specific operations unsuited to particular objectives in SouthEast Asia was the spark for his suggestion that the Army create Delta Force. His creation is now likely deployed in and around Afghanistan, one of the elite units on which the United States is counting to make significant gains in its twin objectives to find Osama bin Laden and remove the Taliban from positions where they can sponsor terror.

Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team

Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team
Danny Coulson
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316601039 (Sept 2001)

Please don't buy No Heroes: Inside the FBI's Secret Counter-Terror Force for its literary value. It's written in the swaggering style of a man who dreams of recruiting John Rambo and harnessing Steven Seagal. Still, its merit lies in that style, a reflection of Danny Coulson, who founded the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. While other countries have submitted to the reshaping of civil liberties to counter terror on their soil, Americans are grappling with what sorts of curtailments they'll brook - if any. Coulson offers a glimpse inside the workings of a unit that regularly dances on the edges of many of those constraints. There's even fascinating insight into how agencies interpret and take advantage of the very laws meant to limit their power. If Coulson's tales are blunt instruments, Christopher Whitcomb's story - Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team - is as pointed as an ice-pick. Among other things, he details the harrowing selection process for the team. Both men recount events at Waco and Ruby Ridge and the differences in their styles is telling of the diverse motives that drive men to this kind of work.

FICTION

The Sum of All Fears

The Sum of All Fears
Tom Clancy
Berkley Pub Group; ISBN: 0425133540

Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears comes to the big screen next year with Ben Affleck in the role formerly inhabited by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford. (Yes, Jack Ryan's been younged-down for this installment.) Clancy always taps into world events, although this particular one has been in the hopper for several years. A Middle Eastern terrorist organization has got its hands on a nuclear device and plans to detonate it on American soil. Jack, as we've come to expect, intuits the plan. But, entirely extraneous problems call his credibility into question and stall his efforts to forestall the crisis through channels. Clancy is rightly respected for the tales he spins, complex, clandestine, and liberally embroidered with fact. His stories always seem utterly fantastic, but the solid basis for them often becomes clear in headlines after their publication.

The Day of the Jackal

The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth
Bantam Books; ISBN: 0553266306

Tom Clancy's novels fantasies may be more realistic, but they lack the spy noir edge of his progenitors like Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and John LeCarré. Ludlum most often looked to history for genesis of his stories, devising complex Nazi conspiracies that survived 1945 to wreak havoc on personal lives two decades later. The Rhinemann Exchange, The Bourne Identity, The Matarese Circle , The Gemini Contenders: we think his earliest work was his best, before his writing started to parody itself. He seems to have regained form, though, in The Sigma Protocol, published posthumously this fall. Frederick Forsyth's masterpiece is still The Day of the Jackal. If you're going to see the movie, make sure it's the tense, completely unsentimental countdown to assassination in the 1973 version. Grimmest of them all, of course, is John LeCarré, for the characters he draws so lovingly, sapped of soul and all too aware of it. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is called LeCarré's first masterpiece with good reason. He followed it up with more jewels, including Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Slightly outside his usual fare, is The Russia House. LeCarré's style is particularly suited to the uncertainties that arose from the persistence of old antagonisms despite the fall of the old regimes. We also like that film for Sean Connery's heartbreaking performance as Barley Blair, clearly the smartest and certainly the drunkest man in the story.