Kate Savage's Reviews > Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

Voluble Vollmann wrote seven volumes about violence and then condensed them in this 700-page book. The first half is about theories of violence; the second is full of 'case studies' from Vollman traveling through violent areas.

The first half is dry. It's a good alternative to Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, another too-long book, but one that cheerily asserts violence is decreasing by downplaying colonialism, Hitler, violence against women, and violence against other species. Vollmann is instead open enough to admit atrocity, confusion, and helplessness. Also I think Vollmann doesn't fall into the man-speak-from-on-high cadence as frequently as Pinker does.

The second half is rich, but I read it on edge. Vollman spends hundreds of pages describing his moral calculus, and all the same I don't quite trust him -- especially the way he looks at women and people of color. A creeping feeling: what's this white dude doing?

But also, I think there's value in passages about war zones like this:

At the Restaran Splendid, it was not yet six, and men sat at a table in the middle of the preordained echoes, saying Sarajevo while a small boy ran back and forth, slapping new echoes down on the tiles which descended all the way to the toilet where the toilet queen and her daughter waited for someone to urinate or defecate and then pay them, and the radio kept talking with an anxious twist of voice like the tightness behind your eyes when you haven’t slept. Then the radio played country music, and the mirror filmed with stale cigarette smoke. It’s only fair to say that I don’t think I would have known from these indications alone that what newscasters call a “tragedy” was going on, which only proves that I am stupid or else that tragedies do not affect anything except themselves, as we all know anyhow — so my point ought to be quite obvious, but novelists and journalists who write about foreboding circumstances too often do what cinema directors do when they instruct the composer to make the musical score sound ominous so that you’ll get it.