Genocide, War and Human Survival.

• Author: Hassner, Ron

Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, eds. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996) 343 pp.

It is never easy reviewing a book that is made up of distinct essays, more so when the theme of the book is humanity's lack of humaneness. Overwhelming as the subject of genocide may be, many academic discussions thereof have proven themselves capable of putting the most sensitive of readers to sleep. This volume, on the other hand, succeeds in drawing the reader into a veritable kaleidoscope of ideas, in which human suffering is reflected in new lights without forgetting for a moment the underlying darkness of suffering and death. Genocide, War and Human Survival is comprised of 25 essays by different authors in a salute to the work of Robert Jay Lifton, this century's prime researcher into human violence and survival. Let it be made clear from the outset that this book treats this most serious of subjects with the extreme caution, sensitivity and its due respect. All its authors write as if they themselves feel the pain of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Rwanda, Cambodia or Bosnia, yet each author does so in an utterly different way. This in fact is what helps the book become the amazing treatise that it is.

War and genocide are generally accepted as political and social phenomena, yet the editors have decided to challenge this view in their choice of contributors to this volume. Some of the authors are academics: sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians. Others are artists: a playwright, a filmmaker, an art teacher. There is a lawyer, a journalist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, one doctor and several theologians. Together they compose a three-dimensional picture of human thought, action and creation in response to mass violence. Lifton is mentioned in most essays, but the reference to him is indirect, hidden in the deepest layer of the text's meaning. The texts crosscut and merge in the facets of events upon which they touch, without any interpretation or school of thought having the upper hand.

This book is successful because of its courage to approach this difficult subject with a holistic methodology, but some points should be made about the more provocative contributions within. After a short introduction, the first part of the book, focusing on Hiroshima and America, begins with a strong historical narrative of former U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson's formulating the history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. Martin J. Sherwin claims that historical nonevents were distorted to justify the use of the atomic bomb, and rather than contributing to a Soviet-American stalemate, it made nuclear war more likely. While I cannot agree with this thesis, wondering how...