My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front

Description

What does America's `war on terror' and new era of religious and patriotic intensity look like to an Englishman living in Seattle?

Jonathan Raban is the author of Passage to Juneau, Bad Land , Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City. Foreign Land (1985) was his first novel; Waxwings his most recent (2003). His work has appeared in the New Yorker , Granta, Harpers, the New York Review of Books, New Republic, and other magazines. In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.

'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