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A Review by Doug Brown

Black Hawk Down closes with a title card which mentions that over 1,000 Somalis died in the battle depicted in the movie. This is immediately followed by a slow title crawl listing the nineteen American soldiers who died in that battle.

The subtly implied math is that these nineteen lives matter more than the 1,000. As Chris Hedges discusses in his thoughtful collection of essays, this valuation of "our" dead over "their" dead is a common element of war.

The title might give the impression that this book would be at home on Patton's shelf, but a glance at the chapter headings shows the book's true heart and mind: "The Myth of War," "The Plague of Nationalism," "The Highjacking and Recovery of Memory," etc. A former seminary student, Hedges is a longtime war correspondent for the New York Times who has seen enough of death and killing. He has seen many governments use the same manipulation of facts to generate support for war and quash dissent.

However, he has also experienced the intoxication of battle. From El Salvador to Iraq to Bosnia, Hedges tells how war gives an immediacy and purpose to people's lives. It is this heady brew that provides the book's title, and is possibly the ultimate contradiction of war — that something so horrible could be so alluring. The themes throughout this excellent survey of why peoples and governments go to war are disturbingly echoed in today's headlines — and perhaps, sadly, they will never be outdated.