Blood and Soil

September 15, 2007
Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, has written extensively on the causes and mechanisms of genocide in Southeast Asia. With this book, he examines genocide globally, venturing a framework by which genocide may be recognized and analyzed. Specifically, the author names four recurring and intertwined ideological preoccupations that tend to motivate the perpetrators of genocidal violence: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, romanticized notions of agrarian society, and cults of antiquity seeking a return to purity and order. Covering instances of genocide on every continentcolonial violence in Australia, Africa, and North America as well as industrial-era violence in Asia, Europe, and the Middle EastKiernan notes haunting continuities across cultures and time periods. (Romes eradication of the Carthaginians, for example, is shown to be a recurrent inspiration for more recent atrocities.) Though sections about the English conquest of Ireland and American violence against Native Americans may unsettle readers expecting to read only about Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, Kiernans assertions are nuanced, and he never wields the term genocide carelessly. A bold and substantial work of unprecedented scope, this book is international history at its best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)