From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This edition of Vollman's treatise on political violence, 20 or so years in the making and completed before 9/11, abridges the 3,000-plus pages of the McSweeney's edition, an NBCC Award nominee last year. As he notes in a beautifully composed introduction, Vollman assumes political violence to be a human constant and thus addresses his attention to finding out when people use violence for political ends, how they justify it and on what scales they undertake it. Following 100 or so pages of expansive definitions, a nearly 300-page section titled "Justifications" culls an enormous number of texts and commentary, from nearly all recorded eras and locales, with all manner of excuses for killing. These Vollman brilliantly distills into "The Moral Calculus," a set of questions such as "When is violent military retribution justified?"—followed by concrete answers. The book's final quarter offers "Studies in Consequences," featuring Vollman's gonzo reportage from southeast Asia, Europe, "The Muslim World" and North America (represented here primarily by Jamaica). An appendix cites the longer edition's entire table of contents. This book's rigorous, novelistic, imaginative, sonorous prose treats a fundamental topic on a grand (and horrific) scale; there is nothing else in literature quite like it. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Vollmann's magnum opus, an extended inquiry into our motivations for and justification of violence, originally took the form of a seven-volume set. Compared with Linnaeus for its taxonomy and Gibbons and Churchill for its historical sweep, depth of analysis, and literary excellence, it is a massive and daunting work, however revelatory. So Vollmann, an intrepid journalist, daring novelist, and all-out writer of conscience and imagination, abridged his epic study into a single volume without losing its essence or power. Why, he asks, has violence always been a part of human affairs? What forms of moral calculus have we used to sanctify and excuse it? As he scrutinizes everything from self-defense to suicide, slavery, torture, genocide, and war, Vollmann turns to an array of thinkers for guidance, including Plato, Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. But he also seeks the wisdom of the living, conducting nervy interviews in the world's hot spots. As rich in feeling as in history and analysis, Vollmann's masterful synthesis illuminates the most tragic realities of the human condition. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description

William T. Vollmann's abridgment of his 3,500-page, seven-volumemagnum opus

An odyssey through the history of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down combines William T. Vollmann's voracious appetite for the details of history with a disregard for his own safety, examines the actions of historical figures, scrutinizes the thinking of philosophers and finds Vollmann posting personal dispatches from some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on earth. The result is his Moral Calculus, a structured decision-making system designed to help the reader decide when violence is justifiable and when it is not.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A labor of seventeen years, Vollmann's first book of non-fiction since 1992's An Afghanistan Picture Show is a gravely urgent invitation to look back at the world's long, bloody path and find some threads of meaning, wisdom, and guidance to plot a moral course. From the street violence of prostitutes and junkies to the centuries-long battles between the Native Americans and European colonists,Vollmann's mesmerizing imagery and compelling logic is presented with authority born of astounding research and personal experience.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

A strange book, then. It is rigorous, like Euclidean geometry, yet twisty, like a pretzel. ''An almost narcissistic didacticism'' seems a pretty fair assessment of Vollmann's rambling historical reflections on Cicero, John Brown and Leon Trotsky, among others. A massive apparatus of endnotes serves not just to document the essays but to link them up to one another. Two stout volumes of his magazine pieces record his experiences in theaters of war and other places where violence is always in the air. He has seen a friend killed; he has loitered in rough neighborhoods with people who use voodoo to keep the chaos at bay (or to try to make it work for them). — Scott McLemee

Publishers Weekly

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, the seven volumes of this work are designed to get ordinary people thinking about the role violence, even at a distance, plays in their lives.

Publishers Weekly