Synopses & Reviews
"Astonishing...seems destined to rank with John Hersey's Hiroshima as a testament of man's inhumanity to man". -- Chicago Tribune
Who cleans up when a war is finished? In Aftermath Donovan Webster, a journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, answers that question by reporting how land mines and other weapons from twentieth-century battlefields continue to maim and kill long after the battles themselves are over.
In Kuwait, munitions experts from six nations are still moving slowly across the sands, an inch at a time, to disarm some of the seven million land mines planted during the Gulf War. In Vietnam, thousands of babies with birth defects continue to be born, victims of Agent Orange sprayings decades ago. And in the United States, nuclear testing will have caused four hundred thousand deaths by the year 2000. In riveting detail, Donovan Webster shows how the lethal remnants of past battles remain tragically potent in the present.
"A poignant reminder of the vast killing fields that the rages of battle have left behind". -- The New York Times
"Haunting....A sobering demonstration (of) the devastation of twentieth-century warfare". -- Seattle Times
Synopsis
In riveting and revelatory detail,
Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards; in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones; in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950's, the results of which are only now becoming apparent; in Vietnam, where a nation's effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation; in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life.
Aftermath excavates our century's darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present.