Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting little volume, 2 Jan 2008
This is not really about the bombing of Guernica at all. Rather it takes this moment from the Spanish Civil War as a vantage point from which to examine the evolution of total war and specifically aerial warfare in political and cultural terms. Given its brevity, this is by no means a comprehensive exploration of anything. It does, though, make some fascinating connections and pose some interesting questions.
The length is a problem, however. There is a strong sense that important issues are glossed over, that the author engages in some 'fancy footwork' in order to keep the word count this low. At various points, I would have liked a fuller discussion of the material, a deeper analysis and a more comprehensive historical frame of reference. Put simply, the length limits the thesis.
Having said that, this is still a succinct, lively and provocative book, and is well worth a couple of hours of your time.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fury of Aerial Bombardment, 25 Mar 2007
Don't be deceived by the size of this little book: it is a masterly account of the development of the mass aerial bombing of civilian populations, focusing primarily on the Spanish Civil War atrocity from which it takes its title and the bombing campaigns of the Second World War, with references too to earlier instances (e.g. Zeppelin attacks, colonialist bombing of Arabs and Kurds) and more recent and continuing manifestations. As the author notes in the Introduction, it's not a work of military history. It casts its net far wider, taking in political debates, psychological consequences and literary representations. Above all, it's about the capacity of the human imagination to respond to the notion and fact of total war. A key theme is the duplicity attending bombing campaigns, ranging from Spanish Nationalist and German denials of involvement in the destruction of Guernica (Germany only formally acknowledged responsibility 60 years after the event) to American denial of causing a tapestry reproduction of Picasso's painting hanging outside the UN Security Chamber to be covered when Powell argued the case for war against Iraq.
The text is accompanied by many striking reproductions of contemporary cartoons, photographs, dust-jackets and posters, and there's a detailed section on `Further reading'. A minor gripe concerns the index: it seems to have been initially intended as an index of names, but then some other terms (including `fear', `impersonality' and `mustard gas') allowed in. In this case, it's hard to see why `morale' and its cognates don't feature since, as the book argues, a continuing debate has been whether mass bombing was/is successful in destroying civilian morale. That small moan aside, this is a book that should be read by anyone concerned by man's inhumanity to children, women and men, the `quite ordinary people in their quite ordinary homes' who have been deliberately targeted as a result of political decisions.
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