About this title: Celebrated urban historian returns with a compelling account of the "poor man's airforce," from Vietnam to Beirut - Davis' most accessible book yet. On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York's Wall Street killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype, the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force," a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide development, in the ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Verso
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781844671328ISBN:1844671321
Description: New. All items are new or shelf pulls. Any defects will be noted with listing. We make every effort to ship your order the same day as received. Multi volume sets and heavy books require EXTRA SHIPPING CHARGES. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Verso Books
Date Published: 2008-08-31
ISBN-13:9781844672943ISBN:1844672948
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781844672943. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Verso Books
Date Published: 2007-04-01
ISBN-13:9781844671328ISBN:1844671321
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781844671328. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VERSO BOOKS Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781844672943ISBN:1844672948
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 224 pages. Traces the car bomb's worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies-particularly those of the united states, israel, india, and pakistan-in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. illustrations (Paperback) read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Verso
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781844671328ISBN:1844671321
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Verso Books
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781844672943ISBN:1844672948
Description: New. Traces the car bomb's worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies-particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan-in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VERSO
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781844672943ISBN:1844672948
Description: New. History of the car bomb traces the political development of this influential weapon of terror and resistance. Winner of the 2007 Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction. In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces the car bomb's worldwi... read more
Description: New. DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091121062735D. read more
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: Verso Books
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781844671328ISBN:1844671321
Description: New. In 1920, Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap, killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype, the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force, " a weapon of mass destruction. This work traces its development, in... read more
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: VERSO
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781844671328ISBN:1844671321
Description: New. In this gripping and disturbing history, Davis traces the worldwide use and development of the car bomb and, in the process, exposes the role of state intelligence agencies in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. read more
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. In this gripping and disturbing history, Davis traces the worldwide use and development of the car bomb and, in the process, exposes the role of state intelligence agencies in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. ISBN10: 1844671321. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Seagull, Calcutta
Date Published: 2008
Description: New. pp. 228. As New. Contents 1. Wall Street 1920. 2. Poor Man's Air force. 3. Preliminary detonations. 4. Oranges for Jaffa. 5. Our man in Saigon. 6. Festivals de Plastique. 7. Demon seeds. 8. Welcome to Bombsville. 9. The Black Stuff. 10. Laughing at the dead. 11. Hell's Kitchen. 12. The Beirut Hilton. 13. Car Bomb University. 14. The suicide tigers. 15. Soft targets. 16. Los Coches Bomba. 17. Cities under siege. 18. Form follows fear. 19. Killing Bush Bombing Oklahoma. 20. Planet Jihad. 21. ... read more
"I think Mike Davis shares my little-boyish love of factional warfare, but thinks its ok because he works for social justice. I think it's ok because I think it's ok."
"This book will probably have me much more aware of my surroundings for the next few months...
The book is a short history of the car bomb from its humble beginnings on Wall Street to its evolution in scope and methodology as a globalized means of leveling the battlefield in just about every theater, no longer just wars.
The big idea that came across is that the very ubiquity of resources available to make big bangs, makes a military/security solution impossible, and really leads only to the logical necessity for political and social solutions to the issues which disenfranchise would be planners from getting so marginalized they wanna make you go boom.
Davis is awesome at clearly laying out subject matter, he addresses a general time line of car bombs and uses the chapters to stop along the way to dwell on innovations and evolutions in car bombs."
"Informative. Disturbing. Probably not a good idea to read this before going to bed like I did.
It didn't have the rhetorical or intellectual flourishes that I wanted it to, like Sven Lindqvist or Rebecca Solnit would have done. But it's a sobering, worthwhile read."
""Buda's wagon truly has become the hot rod of the apocalypse," Davis concludes. Quips like that offer some ironic relief in this relentless genealogy of vehicle-borne terrorism.
At his worst, Davis has the favorite vice of American pundits (left or right) of simply channel-surfing the misery of everyone-but-us in advancing a unified theory whose coherence depends much on its superficiality. That said, this is the same Mike Davis whose "City of Quartz" I read somewhere around 15 years ago, and found to be the most astute urban history of Los Angeles I'd ever read. There is definitely some continuity between these works (and also with his inbetween works which read like Foucault on global capitalism).
At it's best, "Buda's Wagon" is an insightful parody of military histories that demonstrate the irresistable might of the mighty by virtue of their ever-more-expensive toys. Through copious historical example beginning with the first car bomb (exploded not in the Middle East nor any other part of the third world nor in mafialand, but on Wall Street in 1920 by a socialist sympathizer to Sacco and Vanzetti) culminating in the current situation in Iraq, Davis argues that the "poor man's air force" poses a far more pervasive and elusive threat than that of nuclear weapons or any other high-tech weaponry. The ubiquity of such components as ammonium nitrate fertilizer combined with the impossibility of screening weapons that can inflict casualties from an ordinary vehicle located hundreds of yards from its target make car bombs perennially attractive to the bad guys.
The politics of the book are not, by the way, overtly leftist. He has no sympathy for Hezbollah, Escobar, the Tamil tigers and the Sicilian mob. Nor for the socialist who started it all. At the same time, it's hard not to come out of the book stunnned at how much the tactic of the car bomb exceeds the usual assumptions. For example, the first use of car bombs in the Holy Land was by Jews. A militant wing of the Zionist movement who commit what we would now call terrorist acts against government and civilian targets in British Palestine, seeking to provoke civil unrest that could be used to their benefit. Similar tactics were employed in Algiers by militant representatives of the European settler population hoping to provoke the native Algerians to violence that the French military would be compelled to suppress. Yes, counter to that oft-heard right-wing conventional wisdom, it's not just something about Islam. In the past century, there have been Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists perfectly willing to kill civilians indiscriminately.
Once one shifts perspective to the tactic of car bombing (and why the hell not given how long we've spent obsessed with the tactic of "terrorism" as if it stands for a political ideology), it is difficult to imagine how any kind of "surge" or surveillance technology or military strategy could possibly make the world safe. If there is any "message" to be gleaned from Davis's book, surely it is that our only hope lies in working to undermine the underlying conditions that produce terrorists in the first place. Because we are not capable of taking away their ability to hurt us."
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