Stripping bare the body

by Mark Danner

"Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world and written by one of the world's leading writers, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter century. From bloody battleground to dark prison cell to air-conditioned office, it tells the grim and compelling tale of the true final years of the American Century, as the United States passed from the violent certainties of the late Cold War, to the ideological confusions of the post-Cold War world, to the pumped up and ongoing evangelism of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, and the ruins they have left behind. Stripping Bare the Body is a book of stories telling how politics--and its handmaidens: violence and war--is practiced in the brutal worlds of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, the 'black sites' and Washington, D.C. It shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner, then on assi