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ajkhn's review
4.0
This is pretty much my ideal non-fiction book. Graham has a solid thesis he's investigating; the militarization of urban life, and he pulls in lots of stories from all over the Earth in order to show what militarization looks in different contexts. Graham is more than a little angry, and he's calm enough to express his point very well also.
It's a very well-measured read through how cities are being reconstructed. He borrows a lot from Der Derian, Eyal Weziman, and Derek Gregory. In fact, my main quibble with the book is that there are times he borrows so heavily that it seems like he's not really adding anything for pages at a time, just gesturing at Gregory. To be fair, I'd gesture at Gregory, too.
So it's a great sort of pop-geography book with some politics thrown in. It gets you looking at a city skeptically. This is a good thing.
It's a very well-measured read through how cities are being reconstructed. He borrows a lot from Der Derian, Eyal Weziman, and Derek Gregory. In fact, my main quibble with the book is that there are times he borrows so heavily that it seems like he's not really adding anything for pages at a time, just gesturing at Gregory. To be fair, I'd gesture at Gregory, too.
So it's a great sort of pop-geography book with some politics thrown in. It gets you looking at a city skeptically. This is a good thing.
tombomp's review against another edition
3.0
The first 9 chapters are pretty excellent at detailing out the whole mess of militarisation and greater "security" and control, importantly covering cities outside the US and Europe, although maybe not enough and focusing almost entirely on those explicitly involved in wars.
My problems with the first 9 chapters are that the theory is not very well connected to the actual events. He quotes a lot of people who all use very different vocabulary to talk about the same things. Some of it is, quite frankly, ridiculous. For example, here is a sentence: "Such notions of war as being literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space - what Paul James has termed 'metawar'". The proceeding paragraph was quoting from a Chinese army document saying that acts against infrastructure is important. There's absolutely no connection and the claim of being "literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space" is bizarre and hilarious. This is the worst example but I felt a lot of similarly grand claims were made with little evidence and not much holding the whole "theory" of the book together. To a certain extent this might be inevitable, but it just felt tough to read and the myriad of disconnected quotes didn't give me a better picture than the events described, which are important and well-described enough to stand on their own.
The last chapter purports to give ideas for countering militarisation and it's kind of crap. All the ideas given are basically "make art" and it's pretty limited. He highlights a poster as exemplary which basically just says "Fox News is bad" - I'm not denying that but it's not going very far in its critique and the same problem is shared by a lot of what he highlights. It ends with a typically beigy "left" commentary which is a bit frustrating. "Book wasn't Marxist" might seem a silly criticism but it's frustrating when they don't make links that seem obvious to me because they're not being critical enough of the system.
Neither of those two paragraphs is meant to say that the book is rubbish - I enjoyed it and I've learned a lot and the many descriptions of military actions etc are important and useful if you're interested in the subject. Just disappointed it didn't fully live up to my expectations with a deeper, better written analysis.
My problems with the first 9 chapters are that the theory is not very well connected to the actual events. He quotes a lot of people who all use very different vocabulary to talk about the same things. Some of it is, quite frankly, ridiculous. For example, here is a sentence: "Such notions of war as being literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space - what Paul James has termed 'metawar'". The proceeding paragraph was quoting from a Chinese army document saying that acts against infrastructure is important. There's absolutely no connection and the claim of being "literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space" is bizarre and hilarious. This is the worst example but I felt a lot of similarly grand claims were made with little evidence and not much holding the whole "theory" of the book together. To a certain extent this might be inevitable, but it just felt tough to read and the myriad of disconnected quotes didn't give me a better picture than the events described, which are important and well-described enough to stand on their own.
The last chapter purports to give ideas for countering militarisation and it's kind of crap. All the ideas given are basically "make art" and it's pretty limited. He highlights a poster as exemplary which basically just says "Fox News is bad" - I'm not denying that but it's not going very far in its critique and the same problem is shared by a lot of what he highlights. It ends with a typically beigy "left" commentary which is a bit frustrating. "Book wasn't Marxist" might seem a silly criticism but it's frustrating when they don't make links that seem obvious to me because they're not being critical enough of the system.
Neither of those two paragraphs is meant to say that the book is rubbish - I enjoyed it and I've learned a lot and the many descriptions of military actions etc are important and useful if you're interested in the subject. Just disappointed it didn't fully live up to my expectations with a deeper, better written analysis.
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