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": '...massive, unprecedented...at its best, it's rigorous, novelistic, imaginative, sonorous prose treats a fundamental topic on a grand (and horrific) scale.' - Publishers Weekly, on the McSweeney's edition 'This book should be taught in every classroom. Its debates should run through our veins like blood and its lessons should haunt us like unresolved dreams.' - Zembla"
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The authorized, abridged edition of the 3,000-page, seven-volume magnum opus, which was nominated for the US National Book Critic's Circle Award. The LA Times has said of Vollmann: 'He has an uncompromising intelligence that will change the way you think about all of history.' In this book, a labour of twenty-three years, Vollmann will change the way you think about violence. Vollmann brings to this subject compelling logic, knowledge, research and authentic experience. His research is legendary. He has immersed himself in the hazardous worlds he covers and has put himself in harms way. He has been burned by skinheads, nearly frozen to death on the Arctic tundra, and almost blown to pieces by a mine in Bosnia which killed two of his friends. The history of the world is a history of violence. Vollmann looks at violence through the prism of ethics, and honestly addresses both its value and waste. Rising Up, Rising Down is Vollmann's meditation on the age-old conundrum: when is violence justified? Vollmann writes: 'My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.' Vollmann has consulted hundreds of sources, scrutinizing the thinking of philosophers, theologians, tyrants, warlords, military strategists, activists and pacifists. He has visited more than a dozen countries and war zones to witness violence firsthand - sometimes barely escaping with his life. The result is a deeply personal book, full of insight, that is a major publishing event, hailed by Zembla magazine as possibly 'the most ambitious literary project ever'.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the craziest and most brilliant literary projects of our times,
By Oliver Paz (Lisbon Portugal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (Hardcover)
This book is crazy and brilliant. With the publication of this and EUROPE CENTRAL Vollmann instantly becomes one of the three or four writers who really matter. But it will take time for this to become apparent simply because of the vastness of his literary endeavours.
What is RISING UP AND RISING DOWN? It is nothing less than an attempt to assess the place of violence in human affairs. It is a brilliant palliative against all those absurd dewy-eyed assessments of human nature and progress. It accepts that violence is an integral part of human life, that it cannot be dispensed with. It looks at the place of violence in history and how moral calculuses attempt to justify it. This book is in fact a 700 page abridgment of Vollmann's larger 7-volume work on the subject. As an abridgement it inevitably can't be as amazing as the full thing. The first 400 pages are devoted to Vollmann's analysis of the place of violence in human life, through case studies ranging from the familiar (Stalin, Cortes) to the less familiar. He looks in particular at the place of nonviolence as well, discussing Gangh's ideas and showing that they cannot really be used in all cases - that violence has in some cases to be justified. This reminded me of Romeo Dallaire's book on the Rwandan genocide, when he discussed whethe ro rnot he would have been justified in killing the three figureheads of the genocide when he met them to discuss "ceasefire" at one point (in my view, he would). The central point is that human beings can't escape violence and it is delusional to pretend otherwise. This being the case, we urgently need to assess in what cases violence can be justified - as he so intelligently says, ethics is ultimately the art of evaluating justifications. These lead Vollmann to his moral calculus, where he tries to assess how and when violence can be justified. He develops a series of axioms and moral rules which can help to try to assess the situations in which resort to violence may be legitimate. Reading these with certain case studies in mind makes them very helpful - it does really help to crystallise what you might think about events in Colombia, Sudan, Israel/Palestine, etc. The final third of the abridgement is less satisfactory. This is simply because Vollmann doesn't have enough space, I think. He says that what he wants to do is combine theory and history with experience, and so in the second half he devotes himself to case studies of violence which he has experienced around the world - in Bosnia, in Jamaica, in Malaysia and Thailand. In the 7-volume work this comes to about 2 or 3 of the voilumes but here he squeezes it into 25o pages. The result is necessarily a bit truncated, but it does help to perhaps but a novelistic gloss on the ideas of the first 70% of the book. The effect was to make me want to go and read the whole damn 7 volumes - though whether I'll eve rhave the time must be a moot point. This is an important book. It's the sort of book that will still be being read in 100 years time. Vollmann is the sort of author who will be too. He really is a writer for our time. I can't believ ehe isn't bette rknown in the UK, and I can only put it down to envy - since he is so clearly superior to so much that is produced here.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.4 out of 5 stars (14 customer reviews) 78 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ok, it's important. But will I read it?,
By Mark Mauer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Rising Up and Rising Down (Hardcover)
Something that I haven't seen in any of the reviews of Vollmann's book is this: "Am I going to want to read it?" After all, if you're spendng $120 or so on the thing, and you're interested in more that just looking at it on your bookshelf, it should be considered. Sure, Vollmann has written an important book by all accounts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to read it. Or even a quarter of it. Well, good news: Rising Up Rising Down is very readable; moreso I think that his recent novel Argall, on which I remain stuck on around page 350. The book does get heavy of course in its theories and efforts to explore the connections it needs to make. But the chapters themselves are usually very short, and few examples in it last so long that you lose interest. A few more pages and he'll be talking about something else in a different country and different time. I raced through the first volume, and half of the second. At that point I got sidetracked with some other things, but I can't wait to get back into it. In many cases you actually get nice short versions of difficult to understand historical events. For example, one hundred pages on what happened in the early Soviet Union when farms were turned into state owned collectives and the famine that resulted is actually much easir to read than a 500 page book on the topic, Frankly that's enough for me, and if I want to know more about it beyond that, Vollmann gives me a list of plenty of other books to check out on the topic as well. I'll leave it to others to go into the strengths and shortcomings of this book. What I wanted to do here is just encourage people who are on the fence about buying this thing to not be discouraged by its length or topic or bewildering talk of Vollmann's "moral calculus." It is in fact a very interesting read, and the fact that you learn a lot at the same time hasn't hurt me a bit. 24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The abyss gazeth also into thee...,
By The Dilettante "Dilly!" - Published on Amazon.com
The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -Vollman's label for the ethical analysis of violence - is clearly necessary, but the biological realities of violence always seem to render the sterile rationality of philosophers irrelevant. Determining when violence is and is not morally justified is such a difficult task that it is tempting to just dispose of the question, taking refuge in absolutist positions like pacifism or Kissingerian realism. As a result, worthwhile contributions to the practical ethics of war are few and far between.
This is the best attempt to reason through the moral problems of violence since Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and it improves on that flawed work in every way. Vollman's analysis is not limited to nation-states, he distinguishes between just and unjust regimes, he does not assume that there must be a binary moral value to every act of violence, and he knows when to conclude that a moral problem is insoluable. Vollman passes judgment confidently when it is called for, but he has a healthy respect the lesser of two evils, the exigencies of war, and the pressures of decisionmaking in violent situations. He makes objective moral judgments, but they are clearly informed by his own subjective encounters with violence and death. That said, this book has a lot of problems. First off, Vollman is clearly a thrill-seeker. When he talks about packing a handgun in Golden Gate Park or smoking crack cocaine, he reveals a very unusual attitude toward death. We should be suspicious of the moral handwringing of anyone who has deliberately seeks out violence. When he recounts the deaths of his colleagues while he was a reporter in the Balkans, I find myself wondering if this was not another "limit experience" that he actively chased. The experience of an aspiring novelist-DETERMINED to find abysses to gaze into-is just not comparable to that of the Somali and Sarajevan civilians who had no choice but to passively endure extreme violence. The other big problem with this book is the lack of structure and logical rigor. If you have read any of his fiction, you know that this is just how Vollman's (brilliant) mind works, but this book suffers for it. It's a sustained meditation on violence, not a work to which the reader can refer for moral guidance in a specific situation. But it's still the best contemporary work in an otherwise empty field and very much worth reading. 14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Abridged Edition,
By A Common Reader - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (Hardcover)
I have to admit that I felt daunted by the seven volumes of this book and bought the abridged edition. It is astounding! What I found most valuable is not the specific rules Vollmann lays out for deciding whether violence is justified or not, but the detailed and thoughtful examinations of specific historical events and people: the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia; Napoleon, Stalin, Gandhi, and, most importantly, ordinary people who were victims or perpetrators of violence. Vollmann's writing is precise and eloquent and carries you so seamlessly from one page to the next that you don't realize until it's too late that you've reached the end of this 700-page volume. (And then you feel compelled to get your hands on the unabridged edition.) This is an immensely useful and revelatory book.
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