Author Description

"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 assignment for The New Yorker in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, 'Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.' Moving from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo to suicide bombing in the suburban neighborhoods of Baghdad, to torture in the secret 'black site' prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to the political deal making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting in Washington and New York and Langley, Stripping Bare the Body shows the considerations of a wide range of policymakers, and the minute effects their decisions, and their mistakes, have on people in distant places and on Americans as they live and work in 'the indispensable nation.' Here is the history of what Mark Danner calls a 'grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.'"--Jacket