My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front - Hardcover

Raban, Jonathan

3.79

29 ratings by Goodreads

9781590171752: My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590171756 ISBN 13: 9781590171752

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2005

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

What does the "war on terror" and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds that as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own rigidly fundamentalist adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation, spiritual emptiness, and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity. Raban reflects on theBush administration's manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East and its loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism, and he explores the increasing polarization of American politics.--From publisher description.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

‘Raban eloquently argues . . . that the Bush administration’s bellicose unilateralism abroad and burgeoning security state at home were neither the necessary nor best response to the attacks of 2001. Rather, the administration capitalized on an exceptional moment of national unity to take the country down a dangerously antidemocratic, Manichean path that wedded widespread religious faith to a right-wing imperial agenda. As a potent prose stylist and keen observer of the American scene, Raban charts with rare luminosity the changes and widening fissures in American society from 9/11 through 7/7, which makes revisiting even topics like Howard Dean’s presidential race worthwhile. Several thoughtful and compelling chapters grapple, meanwhile, with the largely Western and entirely modern origins of Islamist extremism, drawing on Raban’s demonstrated familiarity with the Middle East . . . The book’s defence of reason over militant irrationalism, resting as it does on the author’s formidable talent for insight and analogy, will inspire readers with the underlying issues at play in this dizzying, event-crammed historical moment’ Publishers Weekly

Book Description:

Bush’s ‘war on terror’ as experienced by an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.