PW Daily picks new Vollman book

[pynchonoid]

PW Daily for Booksellers (September 19, 2003)

[...] PW Editors' Nonfiction Picks for October

[...]  Rising Up and Rising Down by William T.
Vollmann (McSweeney's
(bigsmallpressmall.com), $120 (3,352p in 7 vols.),
ISBN 1-932416-02-1)

This massive, unprecedented book, begun in the early
'80s and mostly
completed by 1998, is nothing less than "a critique of
terrorist,
defensive, military and police activity," along with
an attempt to
construct a moral calculus for the human use of
violence. Focused on
political violence--or force used to realign the ways
in which power
is distributed among and within groups and states--the
book emerges
out of several related questions that Vollmann answers
with historical
and ideological analysis, phenomenological and
physical description,
reportage and quotation: when do people use violence
for political
ends, how do they justify it and at what scale do they
undertake it
given differing situations and ideas about them?
Although Vollmann
does not deal with the events of September 11 or their
aftermath, the
book could not be more timely, and, within certain
limits, it is
almost as successful as it is ambitious. The title
refers to the rise
and fall of states, empires, and militarized factions
and groups. The
discussions of history and historical figures, which
make up a great
deal of the project, have a hard time competing with
the contemporary,
interviews and photographs which are almost always
gripping and
immediate.

In his quest for the complete set of human motivations
for violence,
Vollmann travels to an astonishing range of places and
sifts a
monumental number of texts. The work begins in the
Paris catacombs and
ends with an intense reportorial treatment of the
discrimination
against the Buraku people in Japan--with the final
volume "extracting"
an actual moral calculus from the preceding six. In
between, Vollmann
tallies places figures, organizations and writings
including Aquinas;
an Afghani woman named Anjillah; the Amazon Antiope;
an Aryan Nations
pamphlet; the group known as Black Organizing Power;
the 19th-century
U.S. Bureau of Land Management; Cicero; Columbine; the
Democratic
Republic of Congo; Gandhi; "General X" of the Khmer
Rouge; Idrimi,
king of the ancient Mideastern city of Alalakh; Lenin;
Leonidas, king
of Sparta; the northern magnetic pole; Montezuma;
Robespierre; Saddam
City; Zagreb--and many, many other figures and
locales.

At its best, its rigorous, novelistic, imaginative,
sonorous prose
treats a fundamental topic on a grand (and horrific)
scale. And that
is enough, since the book is designed to get ordinary
people thinking
about the role violence, even at a distance, plays in
their lives, and
what part even bystanders play in the world's
calculus.  [...] 

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