"Graham is a master at world building and her latest is a thrilling, dark, and deadly tale of romantic suspense." –Booklist, starred review, on Haunted Destiny
"Intricate, fast-paced, and intense, this riveting thriller blends romance and suspense in perfect combination and keeps readers guessing and the tension taut until the very end." -Library Journal on Flawless
"The Krewe is back! Graham excels at weaving history, finding the proper balance between past and present and keeping a story fresh and authentic... The chaos and camaraderie of the characters are captured with vivid detail, and the identity of the killer will keep you guessing until the very end." –RT Book Reviews on Haunted Destiny
"Graham is the queen of romantic suspense, and her latest is proof that she deserves the title. What makes this story more fun than most is the relationship between Kieran Finnegan, who wants nothing more than family harmony and a functioning restaurant, and FBI agent Craig Fraiser, who wants justice. Sparks fly, and it's electric." –RT Book Reviews on Flawless
"Each new book involving the Krewe of Hunters takes the reader on a dark adventure where speaking to the dead is an everyday occurrence, the past and present collide and compelling characters find a sense of belonging. Graham's skill for rendering her world in such vivid detail makes readers want to know more about the real-life locations she draws from." –RT Book Reviews
"Riveting... If you are in the market for a good mystery, interesting history, sweet romance with a second chance at love then Darkest Journey is the book you want to read." –Fresh Fiction
"Graham stands at the top of the romantic suspense category." -Publishers Weekly
"This chilling novel has everything: suspense, romance, intrigue and an ending that takes your breath away." -Suspense Magazine on The Betrayed
"Graham deftly weaves elements of mystery, the paranormal and romance into a tight plot that will keep the reader guessing at the true nature of the killer's evil." -Publishers Weekly on The Unseen
"An incredible storyteller." -Los Angeles Daily News
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels. She's a winner of the RWA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. For more information, check out her websites: TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com, eHeatherGraham.com, and HeatherGraham.tv. You can also find Heather on Facebook.
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"Bunmi Laditan is that rare author who perfectly captures the gooey mess of panic, hilarity and love that is the essence motherhood. An honest, brilliantly funny novel about being good enough, Confessions of a Domestic Failure will make you cry with laughter and want Ashley for your best friend. The funniest novel I've read this year."-Kristan Higgins, New York Times bestselling author
"Freaking hilarious. This is the novel moms have been waiting for."-Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Bunmi Laditan is a regular contributor to Parenting.com, Mothering.com, iVillage.com, and the Huffington Post, and she has appeared on Good Morning America and CBS Sunday Morning. She lives with her family outside of Montreal.
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Ian Mortimer is the author of the bestselling Time Traveller's Guide series. He is an experienced lecturer and public speaker and regularly appears at literary festivals around the country. He is also writes for the media.
Joanna Courtney has wanted to be a writer ever since she could read. After spending endless hours entertaining her siblings with made-up stories, it was no surprise when Joanna pursued her passion for books during her time at Cambridge University - where she combined her love of English and History by specializing in Medieval Literature. Joanna continued to write through her first years of work and then, married and living in Derbyshire, in the sparse hours available between raising four children. She teaches creative writing across the country and for the Open University. Joanna is fascinated by defining moments in history, of which the Battle of Hastings is certainly one. The outcome of that momentous day is one of the big 'what-ifs?' of England's past and she has loved being able to immerse herself in the world of the Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Vikings whilst writing The Queens of the Conquest trilogy.
"In this book, Powell does for music what Masters and Johnson did for sex."
―Bernie Krause, PhD, author of The Great Animal Orchestra
"A buffet of insights and oddities."
―Kirkus Reviews
"Powell draws on decades of other people's research, filtered through his own charming sense of humor, to help readers hear music with fresh ears....He delivers a solid case for why, indeed, people love (and need) music."―Publishers Weekly
"WHY YOU LOVE MUSIC is highly amusing and informative, and makes for casual reading of a superior kind."―-Philip Marchand, National Post (Canada)
Scientist and musician John Powell holds a PhD in physics from Imperial College (London University) and a Master's degree in music from the university of Sheffield (UK). He is the author of How Music Works.
"Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures are the most common subtype of functional neurologic disorder and it is important for the medical community to know how to help these patients. Unfortunately, functional neurologic disorders have fallen into a black hole between neurologists and
psychiatrists, and it has been difficult to find appropriate care. This excellent book points a way forward. Not only does it summarize the current literature on diagnosis, pathophysiology, and therapy, but it emphasizes the need for a multidisciplinary approach. The book gives guidance for how
neurologists, psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals can work together."
--Mark Hallett, MD, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, MD
"Drs. Dworetzky and Blaset, together with their team of experts, have provided a concise and thorough review of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. This book provides insight on diagnosis, mechanisms, and therapy and is a must read for all neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists involved
in this underserved, large population."
--Orrin Devinsky, MD, Chief of Service, NYU Epilepsy Service, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY
Dr. Dworetzky is the Chief of Epilepsy at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. She leads the large multidisciplinary Bromfield Epilepsy Program and directs the EEG laboratory and the clinical training fellowships in her field. Dr. Dworetzky is the Chair of the Clinical Council of Activities for the American Epilepsy Society and is a leading expert in psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. Together with Dr. Baslet, she sees patients in a shared clinical setting to enhance patient engagement in treatment.
Dr. Gaston Baslet is an Associate Psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in the neuropsychiatric aspects of epilepsy and functional neurological symptom disorder, including psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. His particular focus is in the development of therapeutic strategies for short-term and long-term management of PNES.
“What accounts for this novel’s explosive momentum? . . . [Hannah Tinti] knows how to cast the old campfire spell. I was so desperate to find out what happened to these characters that I had to keep bargaining with myself to stop from jumping ahead to the end. . . . Each [chapter] is a heart-in-your-throat revelation, a thrilling mix of blood and love. . . . Some of these well-drawn characters exist only for a few pages; others rear up again when you least expect them. . . . A master class in literary suspense.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds. Her ability to lay bare their passions, portraying their vulnerabilities and violent urges with equal insight, leaves the reader at once shaken and moved.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“The Twelves Lives of Samuel Hawley is a thrillingly told tale that touches on the mythological and the mundane with equally compelling results.”—Buzzfeed
“This is a surprising and celebratory father-daughter story told with astonishing language and scope.”—BBC
“[A]n unforgettable novel that is one part coming-of-age, one part mystery, and all parts utter delight.”—PopSugar
“Many love stories, all wrapped up into one gripping narrative that traverses time and space to mediate on life’s most profound questions: those surrounding death, love, and the fleeting nature of everything we hold dear. Tinti’s storytelling is masterful—she weaves together dozens of beautifully drawn characters.”—NYLON
“Tinti knows how to blend emotional connections with engrossing plots.”—The Huffington Post
“[An] atmospheric, complexly suspenseful saga . . . with life or death struggles in dramatic settings . . . and starring a fiercely loving, reluctant criminal and a girl of grit and wonder . . . a breathtaking novel of violence and tenderness.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Seamlessly transposing classical myth into a quintessentially American landscape and marrying taut suspense with dreamy lyricism, [Hannah] Tinti’s beautifully intricate second novel is well worth the wait. . . . Tinti’s imagery evokes time, space, the sea, and the myth of Heracles without losing the narrative’s sure grounding in American communities and culture. This is a convincingly redemptive and celebratory novel: an affirmation of the way that heroism and human fallibility coexist, of how good parenting comes in unexpected packages, and of the way that we are marked by our encounters with each other and the luminous universe in which we dwell.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A riveting character-driven thriller, a father-daughter road trip you won’t soon forget . . . Fans of The Good Thief who have been waiting for whatever comes next from this gifted writer will find their patience richly rewarded.”—Richard Russo, author of Everybody’s Fool
“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation. Hannah Tinti proves herself to be an old-fashioned storyteller of the highest order.”—Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
“What Hannah Tinti knows about fathers, daughters, and time could, as they say, fill a book—and truly does. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is bold, exciting, and original.”—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is utterly magnificent—gripping, suspenseful, funny, and so full of heart. Young Loo and her father are contemporary characters with the stature and magnetism of the great heroes of literature. The reader in me was racing through to find out what would befall them, while the writer, awestruck by Hannah Tinti’s powerful storytelling, was desperately trying to slow down. This is a book I will return to again and again, for sheer pleasure and to learn how it is done.”—Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being
Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection Animal Crackers was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her bestselling novel The Good Thief won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an American Library Association Alex Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tinti is the co-founder and executive editor of the award-winning literary magazine One Story.
Hawley
When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun. He had a case full of them in his room, others hidden in boxes around the house. Loo had seen them at night, when he took the guns apart and cleaned them at the kitchen table, oiling and polishing and brushing for hours. She was forbidden to touch them and so she watched from a distance, learning what she could about their secrets, until the day when she blew out birthday candles on twelve chocolate Ring Dings, arranged on a plate in the shape of a star, and Hawley opened the wooden chest in their living room and put the gift she had been waiting for—her grandfather’s rifle—into her arms.
Now Loo waited in the hallway as her father pulled down a box of ammunition from the front closet. He took out some .22 rimfires—long-rifle and Magnum—as well as nine-millimeter Hornady 115-grain. The bullets rattled inside their cardboard containers as he slid them into a bag. Loo took note of every detail, as if her father’s choices were part of a test she would later have to pass. Hawley grabbed a bolt-action Model 5 Remington, a Winchester Model 52 and his Colt Python.
Whenever he left the house, Loo’s father carried a gun with him. Each of these guns had a story. There was the rifle that Loo’s grandfather had carried in the war, notched with kills, that now belonged to her. There was the twenty-gauge shotgun from a ranch in Wyoming where Hawley worked for a time running horses. There was a set of silver dueling pistols in a polished wooden case, won in a poker game in Arizona. The snub-nosed Ruger he kept in a bag at the back of his closet. The collection of derringers with pearl handles that he hid in the bottom drawer of his bureau. And the Colt with a stamp from Hartford, Connecticut, on the side.
The Colt had no particular resting place. Loo had found it underneath her father’s mattress and sitting openly on the kitchen table, on top of the refrigerator and once on the edge of the bathtub. The gun was her father’s shadow. Resting in the places he had passed through. If Hawley was out of the room, sometimes she would touch the handle. The grip was made of rosewood, and felt smooth beneath her fingers, but she never picked it up or moved it from whatever place he had set it down.
Hawley grabbed the Colt now and tucked it under his belt, then strung the rifles across his shoulder. He said, “Come on, troublemaker.” Then he held open the door for them both. He led his daughter into the woods behind their house and down into the ravine, where a stream rushed over mossy rocks before emptying out into the ocean.
It was a clear day. The leaves had abandoned their branches for the forest floor, a carpet of crimson, yellow and orange; crisp and rustling. Loo’s father marked a pine tree at two hundred yards with a small spot of white paint, then set the bucket down and walked back to his daughter and the guns.
Hawley was in his forties but looked younger, his hips still narrow, his legs strong. He was as tall as a longboat, with wide shoulders that sloped from the years of driving his truck back and forth across the country with Loo in the passenger seat. His hands were callused from the day jobs he’d work from time to time—fixing cars or painting houses. His fingernails were lined with grease and his dark hair was always overgrown and tangled. But his eyes were a deep blue and he had a face that was rough and broken in a way that came out handsome. Wherever they had stopped on the road, whether it was for breakfast at some diner on the highway, or in a small town where they’d set up for a while, Loo would notice women drifting toward him. But her father would make his mouth go still and set his jaw and it kept anyone from getting too close.
These days his truck wasn’t going anywhere except down to the water, where they dug clams and hauled buckets of shells. Quahogs, Hawley called them. But also littlenecks, topnecks, steamers and cherrystones, depending on their size and color. He used a rake to hunt but Loo preferred a long, thin spade that could pierce the surface before the creatures began to burrow. Early each morning father and daughter rolled their pants above their knees and slipped on rubber boots. The shells were pulled from the salt marshes and mudflats, from the sandy bay and at low tide along the shore.
Hawley took the Remington off his shoulder and showed Loo how to load the clip. Five bullets slid inside, one by one. Then the magazine clicked into place.
“This is for starters. A practice gun. It won’t do much damage. But still,” he said. “Keep the safety on. Check your target and what’s behind your target. Don’t point it at anything you don’t want to shoot.”
He opened the bolt, retracted, then closed it again, pulling the first live round into the chamber. Then he handed his daughter the rifle. “Plant your feet,” he said. “Loosen your knees. Take a breath. Let half of it out. That’s when you want to squeeze the trigger. On the exhale. Don’t pull—just squeeze.”
The Remington was cool and heavy in Loo’s hands, and her arms shook a little as she raised the stock to her shoulder. She had dreamed of holding one of her father’s guns for so many years that it was as if she were dreaming now. She tried to level the sight as she took aim, pulled the handle in close, lifted her elbow and last, last of all, flipped off the safety.
“What are you going to shoot?” her father asked.
“That tree,” said Loo.
“Right.”
In her mind she imagined the trajectory of the bullet, saw it going for miles, creating its own history. She knew every part of this gun, every gear and bolt, and she could sense each piece now—the spring and the carrier and the chamber and the pin—working together and sliding into place as she touched the trigger.
The explosion that followed was more of a pop than a blast. The butt of the rifle barely moved against her shoulder. She expected a thrill, some kind of corresponding shudder in her body, but all she felt was a tiny bubble of relief.
“Look,” her father said.
Loo lowered the barrel. She could just make out the white mark in the distance, untouched. “I missed.”
“Everyone misses.” Hawley scratched his nose. “Your mother missed.”
“She did?”
“The first time,” he said. “Now slide the bolt.”
“Did she use this gun?”
“No,” said Hawley. “She liked the Ruger.”
Loo pulled back on the lever and the casing flung through the air and onto the forest floor. She locked the bolt back into place, and the next bullet slid into the chamber. Her mother, Lily, had died before the girl could remember. A drowning accident in a lake. Hawley had shown Loo the exact spot where it had happened, on a map of Wisconsin. A small blue circle she could hide with the tip of her finger.
Hawley did not like to speak about it. Because of this the air shimmered a bit whenever he did, as if Lily’s name were conjuring something dangerous. Most of what Loo knew about her mother was contained in a box full of mementos, a traveling shrine that her father re-created in the bathroom of each place they lived. Motel rooms and temporary apartments, walk-ups and cabins in the woods, and now this house on the hill, this place that Hawley said would be their home.
The photographs went up first, around the bathtub and sink. Her father affixed each carefully so they wouldn’t rip—shots of Loo’s mother and her long black hair, pale skin and green eyes. Next he arranged half-used bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a compact and a tube of red lipstick, a bent toothbrush, a silk bathrobe with dragons sewn on the back and cans of Lily’s favorite foods—pineapple and garbanzo beans—along with bits of handwriting, scraps of paper discovered after her death, things she had needed from the grocery store, lists of activities she had hoped to finish by the following Saturday and a parking ticket with fragments of a dream scribbled on the back. Old car with hinges folds down into a suitcase. Every time Loo used the toilet or took a bath, she faced her mother’s words, watching the letters bleed together over the years and the ink fade from the steam of the shower.
The dead woman was an ever-present part of their lives. When Loo did something well, her father said: Just like your mother, and when she did something bad, her father said: Your mother would never approve.
Loo squeezed the trigger. She did it again and again, reloading for over an hour, occasionally nicking bark from the tree but missing the target every time, until there was a pile of brass shells at her feet and her arm ached from the weight of the gun.
“The mark’s too small,” said Loo. “I’ll never hit it.”
Hawley pulled a wallet of tobacco from his pocket and shook it back and forth at her. Loo put down the gun. She walked over and took the pouch from him, as well as a package of rolling papers. She slid one thin piece of paper away from the rest, folded it in half with her finger and then tucked some of the tobacco along the crease. Then she placed the filter and began rolling, pinching the ends, licking the edge to seal the fold. She handed the cigarette to her father, and he lit it and settled onto a rock nearby, leaning into the sun. He had started a beard, as he did whenever the weather turned cold, and he scratched it now, his fingers catching in the wiry brown hair.
“You’re thinking too much.”
Loo tossed the pouch at him, then picked up the rifle again. Her father had hardly spoken during the lesson, as if he expected her to already know how to shoot. She’d been excited when they started, but now she was losing her nerve—in the same way she did in the bathroom surrounded by scraps of her mother’s words and cans of her mother’s favorite foods and pictures of her mother’s effortless beauty.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
The tide was coming in. Loo could hear the ocean beyond the ravine, gathering strength. One wave after another advancing upon the shore. Hawley tucked the roll of tobacco back into his pocket.
“There’s nothing between you and that tree.”
“I’m between it.”
“Then get out of the way.”
Loo flipped the safety on and put the rifle down again. She dug a rock out of the dirt with her fingers and threw it into the woods as far as she could. The rock sailed halfway toward the white mark and then crashed into some bushes. Birds scattered. The sound of a plane passed overhead. Loo looked through the branches at the flash of aluminum in the sky. Thirty thousand feet away and it seemed like an easier target.
Hawley’s cigarette had gone out as he watched her and now he relit the end, striking a match, the ember glowing once, twice, as he brought it to his lips. Then he crushed the cigarette against the rock. He blew smoke out of his mouth.
“You need a mask.” Hawley lifted his giant hands and covered his own face. Then he opened his fingers, framing his eyes and forming a bridge across his nose. It made him look like a stranger. Then Hawley dropped the mask and he was her father again.
“Try it,” he said.
Loo’s hands were not as big but they did the job, closing her off from the woods and her own disappointment. It was like blinders on a horse. Things got blurry or disappeared when she turned her eyes left or right.
“How am I supposed to shoot like this?”
“Use it to focus, then pick up the gun,” said Hawley.
Loo turned back toward the target. The sun was beginning to set. The white spot of paint caught the light and was glowing. What surrounded the tree—the earth, the sky, its own branches—fell away. This was how her father must see things, she thought. A whole world of bull’s-eyes.
Just then, beyond the mark, there was a shuffling of leaves. Some kind of movement in the woods. Loo dropped her hands from her face. She held her breath. She heard only the sound of the wind. The rattle of birch leaves flipping back and forth. The distant echo of the plane in the clouds. The scratch of a squirrel’s claws as it scrambled up the bark of a tree. But her father was listening for something else. His chin was down, his eyes cutting left. His face tensed and ready.
Hawley was always watching. Always waiting. He got the same look when they went into town for supplies, when the mailman came to their door, when a car pulled alongside them on the road. She heard him late at night, walking the living room floor, checking the locks on the windows. Digging on the beach for clams, he kept his back to the sea. These were small things, but she noticed. And she noticed now, as his whole body became still. He reached behind to his belt, and his hand came back with the Colt.
Brendan Shipton is a philosopher, poet, musician, empath and long-time marijuana enthusiast, who has been fighting for full marijuana legalization in the US for nearly two decades. And though he had not planned to open a cannabis cooperative, the insight gained from his research on Cannabis, its lack of toxicity, and the fact that big business was mucking things up, yet again, made it mandatory. Brendan's motto--"Fighting Big Pharma, Banking, and Big Oil one joint, salve, tincture, laced cookie at a time." Brendan happily resides in a small home on an island just off the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. (Brendan Shipton Cannabis: The Cure)
Ann M. Coulston, MS, RD, has a more than 20-year history of clinical research at Stanford University Medical Center where her research centered on carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, the nutritional management of diabetes, and insulin resistance. She has provided nutrition consultation to the food and healthcare industry, public relations firms, and Internet companies. She is past-president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) and has been recognized by the American Dietetic Association Foundation for excellence in the practice of clinical nutrition and the practice of research.
Carol J. Boushey, PHD, MPH, RD, is an Associate Researcher in the Epidemiology Program of the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and an Adjunct Professor in the Nutrition Science Department at Purdue University. Her research includes dietary assessment methods, dietary patterns, and quantitative methods. At the Cancer Center, she directs the Nutrition Shared Resource. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association.
Mario G. Ferruzzi, PhD is a Professor of Food Science and Nutrition at Purdue University. His research interests are in the area of phytochemical bioavailability, metabolism and their role in chronic disease prevention. Additionally, he has industrial experience in product research and development. Prior to joining Purdue in 2004, he was a Research & Development Scientist with Nestlé R&D in Marysville, OH and Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a member of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the American Society for Nutrition (ASN), and the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Linda Delahanty, MS, RDN, LD is Chief Dietitian and Director of Nutrition and Behavioral Research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Diabetes Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a nationally recognized authority on nutrition and lifestyle interventions for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. She was a recipient of the National Award for Excellence in the Practice of Dietetics Research and the Medallion Award for lifetime achievement in the dietetics profession from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and received the American Diabetes Association’s Outstanding Educator in Diabetes Award in 2015.
She was chair of the Dietitians Committee for the landmark Diabetes Control and Complications Trial and was one of the architects of the lifestyle interventions for the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, the Diabetes Prevention Program, Look AHEAD and the TODAY study. Ms Delahanty has been a co-investigator in four NIH-funded multi-center clinical trials and is currently one of the Principal Investigators for the NIH-funded REAL HEALTH Diabetes study to translate the Look AHEAD lifestyle intervention into primary care.
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Jonathan Sklar is a training analyst and fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Originally trained in psychiatry at Friern and the Royal Free Hospitals, he worked for four years in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London. For many years he was consultant psychotherapist and head of the psychotherapy department at Addenbrookes and Fulbourn hospital in Cambridge. He now works in full time analytic practice in London. He teaches and supervises at the Institute of Psychoanalysis; teaches an MSc course on "Ferenczi and Contemporary Psychoanalysis" at University College London; and teaches in Chicago. For the past five years, he has convened a psychoanalytic conference outside Cape Town and, for thirty years, has convened Balint groups working with general practitioners and psychiatrists. He has lectured widely throughout Europe as well as in South America. His psychoanalytic papers have been published in Italian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. From 2007-2011 he was Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation.
Welcome to a place where parents are celebrated, not compared. Where heart is at the center of our families, and family at the center of our homes. Where boo-boos are still kissed, cake beaters are still licked, and mistakes are still okay. Welcome to a place where books and family are beautiful. Familius: a book publisher dedicated to helping families be happy.
"It might be comforting to think that angry young Islamists are crazed psychopaths or sex-starved adolescents who have been brainwashed in malign madrassas. But Mr. Sageman . . . explodes each of these myths, and others besides, in an unsettling account of how Al Qaeda has evolved from the organisation headed by Osama bin Laden into an amorphous movement—a 'leaderless jihad.'"—The Economist
Praise for Leaderless Jihad:
"Sageman's incisive observations based on carefully examined evidence, astute insights, and scholarship make Leaderless Jihad the gold standard in Al Qaeda studies."—Washington Times
"Leaderless Jihad discredits conventional wisdom about terrorists by eschewing anecdotes and conjecture in favor of hard data and statistics."—Time
"The most sophisticated analysis of global jihadis yet published. . . . His conclusions have demolished much of the conventional wisdom about who joins jihadi groups."—William Dalrymple, New York Review of Books
Praise for Understanding Terror Networks:
"The best source of information about modern Islamic terrorists."—Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books
Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, is a government counterterrorism consultant. He is author of Misunderstanding Terrorism, Leaderless Jihad, and Understanding Terror Networks, all of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Preface
On April 15, 2013, at the end of the Boston Marathon, two bombs exploded in the crowd of spectators, killing 3 people and injuring more than 250 others. Within a few days, the perpetrators were identified as two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who were Chechen refugees. Tamerlan, the older one, was killed in the ensuing police dragnet, but Dzhokhar survived despite being wounded multiple times. By all accounts, he seemed to be a well-assimilated and sociable young man, attending college and smoking marijuana with his friends.
Shortly after the bombing, my usually silent phone started ringing off the hook. Journalists called to ask the same question: how could an apparently normal young man like Dzhokhar do this, seemingly out of the blue? I was just emerging from a long involvement with the U.S. intelligence community, during which I was banned from speaking with journalists. Although now free to talk to them, I was still at a loss to provide a short and pithy answer. Despite spending over a decade straddling government and academia working on terrorism issues, I still did not entirely understand what leads a person to turn to political violence. How does one start to make sense of this senseless violence? Do these individuals have something psychologically wrong with them, as many people believe? Are they victims of a mysterious process of brainwashing or indoctrination, as many others believe? More fundamentally, how does one conceptualize terrorism, terrorists, and the process by which a very few people become terrorists? I concluded that only with a radical change of perspective could scholars hope to answer these questions.
What leads people to turn to political violence? This haunting question has obsessed me ever since the tragedy of 9/11. This book originated as a short historical introduction to a book on the current wave of global neojihadi attacks against the West. However, this attempt to contextualize this current wave of terrorism proved far more complicated as I dug deeper into each historical case. Parallel to this revelation were developments in various academic disciplines, changes in the political climate, and not least, insights gained through actual encounters with politically violent people.
The political climate since 11 September 2001 has changed. In the decade following 9/11, the anticipated onslaught of terroristic violence in the United States did not materialize. This allowed some scholars to step back and take some distance from the devastation of that day. Alarmist voices among self-promoting experts no longer rang true when faced with the paucity of actual global neojihadi attacks in this country. I was privileged to examine the evidence for many of the government claims from the inside and was struck by the lack of substance behind many of them. I also investigated many alleged instances of political violence, including interviews with alleged perpetrators, and realized that many of the claims were somewhat overblown. This does not mean that there is no threat, but overall the risk is quite small, especially when compared with fatalities from accidents and other forms of human violence in this country.
At the same time, there were many developments in academic fields that have always been a source of inspiration for my work. New scholarship on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and violence during the French Revolution challenged many of my fundamental assumptions about political violence. These studies focused on how political actors conceived of and understood themselves and their actions at the time they committed their acts. New developments in cognitive and social psychology, especially in the social identity perspective, have reinterpreted classical experimental evidence that had defied interpretation. These research findings have direct relevance on political violence, and I have incorporated them into this work.
My interviews with perpetrators of political violence and review of transcripts of interviews of others made me aware of the importance they attributed to government action against them in their explanations of their actions. Political violence necessarily involves contested narratives, and perpetrators defined themselves in contrast to governmental agents and their actions, which gave meaning to their violence in the context of a conflict between them and the state. They viewed their actions as response to state aggression. In their minds, their violence could not be understood outside this escalating conflict. Indeed, as some scholars have previously pointed out, much political violence involves competition with the state, in a cycle of escalation culminating in ever-increasing violence. Like a boxing match, it is impossible to understand a fight without looking at both combatants: the actions of each are the context to which the other reacts. To understand the violent effects of any conflict requires an examination of both belligerent parties.
This raises the sensitive issue of the state's potential contribution to non-state political violence. Because funding for terrorism research comes exclusively from the state, the subtle temptation is simply to overlook the role of the state so as not to jeopardize one's funding. I was fortunate to be in position to do this project on my own, without any government support, and was therefore free to explore this important topic. This book brings the state back into the investigation of non-state political violence by analyzing violence as emerging out a conflict between the perpetrators and the state.
Prolonged immersion in the archival material and very detailed legal evidence to which I had access, extensive interviews with actual perpetrators, and time to think without any imposed deadlines, interruptions from work, or other demands on my time allowed me to explore the subject of political violence more deeply by comparing this current wave with previous campaigns of political violence. As a result, this is not another quickly written book exploiting great tragedies, like the vast majority of popular books on terrorism. It is the result of my own gradual intellectual journey to try to consolidate disparate insights originating in very different disciplines—historical, psychological, political, sociological, and cultural.
Time and further study eroded my original conceptual and methodological foundations and reshaped the emotional commitment that drove me on. I became more skeptical of the conventional perspective on my original subjects—terrorism and radicalization—to the point that I have avoided use of these concepts. This study is a first, tentative, and imperfect step to understand what leads people to become politically violent. My goal is to inform the debate on this issue and draw attention to relevant questions. I hope to raise the level of this debate, unmask our preconceived and often mistaken notions imbedded in it, and subject all arguments to empirical and critical examination. One of my goals is to provide the missing facts that may transform future debate from stale polemical repetition of the same worn-out and simplistic arguments to consideration of more fruitful ones. I tried to collect as complete and reliable a set of historical details as possible to give readers an opportunity to study them within their own perspective and challenge some of my conclusions. This explains the length of this study, which I hope will become a source book for future work and lead to future debates based on evidence rather than speculations about the worst possible scenario. Such speculations on terrorists' possible use of nuclear or biological weapons have unfortunately largely shaped the debate about political violence in the West. Of course, one must protect oneself against these catastrophic scenarios, but one should not allow them to completely transform one's everyday life. Instead, I suggest getting into the minds of violent political actors in order to understand them and to avoid preventable future instances of political violence. All of these insights allowed me to go beyond the tyranny of labels and question some of the conventional wisdom based on prejudice, polemics, and a paucity of data to understand politically violent actors. The result is a paradigm shift in how to look at political violence.
This book is not a sweeping narrative of Western non-state political violence—often referred to as terrorism. It is a theoretical examination of a process, the turn to political violence, with historical illustrations of it whenever there were adequate primary sources that I could understand. It is not a comprehensive historical survey of political violence, as it obviously skips over three of its most prominent instances, namely Irish, Balkan, and colonial violence.
To understand this violent turn, one must understand the perpetrators from the inside, an enterprise fraught with danger. The murder of innocent victims inherent in political violence is an appalling act that rightly deserves condemnation. However, an outside perspective on such crimes obscures an internal one that is more fruitful in understanding and preventing them. The perspective of the scholar must be detached and dispassionate and assume that political violence is ultimately explicable. Like a surgeon needing to cut a person, a temporary harm, in order to cure or alleviate that person's suffering—a greater good—the scholar must therefore put aside the victims' cries that the perpetrator is pure evil, craving and enjoying the suffering of the victims. A scholar must assume that these crimes have a meaning for the perpetrators and try to capture their subjectivity to understand this meaning. In suspending his moral judgment for the sake of long-term prevention, he or she must adopt the perpetrator's point of view. It is natural for the public to identify with victims of political violence especially when they are members of the same group. The perpetrators are naturally categorized into stereotypes that distinguish them from the general public. To even try to look at them as normal human beings, similar to the public at large, may seem like an act of betrayal of the victims' group norms and values, especially in time of real danger to one's group, when the emotional need is for support and sympathy.
An illustration of the public's rejection of the normality of terrorists was the mass protest against a Rolling Stone cover picture and (accurate and detailed) story of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber, resulting in a boycott of that issue of the magazine because he looked like the typical teenager that he was. The press is complicit in presenting distorted portraits of terrorists with active editorial suppression of any facts that might reflect positively on a suspected perpetrator. Dedicated journalists have complained to me that their stories were edited to provide a negative picture of the suspects to conform to the conventional stereotype. Such distortions challenge the reliability of flawed newspaper accounts as sources for terrorism research. Terrorism arouses strong emotion that obstructs scientific dispassionate investigation; anything seen as slightly sympathetic to them is viewed as a betrayal of the community. So, to the public, a detached and dispassionate scrutiny of a perpetrator might seem to "make excuses" for him, "justify" the violence, or worse, "blame the victim."
This book's approach may be initially hard for people to share because terrorists are heroes in their own minds and taking their perspective may seem like glorifying them. To lessen this concern, I stayed away from recent atrocities still fresh in people's minds and analyzed historical examples of political violence, hoping that time has granted us some distance from the victims' suffering and the panic these attacks generated. Nevertheless, my enterprise may still seem like an insult to the memory of the victims or a betrayal of one's natural sympathy for them. I understand and respect this view. The aim of this study is to understand political violence in order to minimize it and save lives in the future. Meaningful understanding of perpetrators requires transcending one's natural and rightful inclination to identify with victims. Even those interested in understanding the causes of this type of violence may reject this necessary detached perspective as simple forgiveness. I am not an apologist for terrorists and agree that we ultimately need to come back to the perspective of innocent victims and make individuals responsible for their actions. In carrying out their crimes, each perpetrator believed that he or she acted out a virtuous sacrifice. To them, the innocents killed were unfortunate collateral damage, the cost of doing business. This is no excuse for the victims and justice demands taking their perspective. However, this study is not an attempt to bring justice to the victims but to understand how the crime emerged in order to prevent future ones. Taking the perpetrator's perspective is just a means to an end. Eventually, perpetrators must be held accountable for what they did—as must governments—and punished appropriately.
In a sense, this book reverses the chronology of my evolving understanding of political violence. I first traced the process of turning to violence in the present wave of global neojihadi terrorism and compared it to detailed historical accounts of campaigns of violence. I then searched for cognitive and social psychological theories that provided a foundation for this process. In this book, I first present a model of this process by distilling it from relevant cognitive and social psychological perspectives that frame the later empirical chapters. Those interested in the theoretical model should focus on Chapters 1 and 8, while those more interested in the history of political violence might first read the empirical chapters, 2 through 7, before returning to the theoretical chapters explaining these events. The cumulative narrative in the empirical chapters traces the emergence of modern terrorism from mob violence in the eighteenth century during the French Revolution to a wave of regicides and finally indiscriminate mass murder in the early twentieth century. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the emergence of all the elements of modern political violence that occurred in France from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune. Chapter 4 portrays the transformation of peaceful activists into full-time terrorists in nineteenth-century Russia, which is often taken as the starting point of terrorist historiography. Chapter 5 shows how targeted political violence expanded into more indiscriminate killing through the evolution of anarchist violence in France and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 6 returns to Russia to describe the specialization of political violence with the creation of the Combat Unit of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party. Chapter 7 shows the further degeneration of political violence into the banditry of the Bonnot Gang in France and the indiscriminate bombings of the Galleani group in the United States. Between these two campaigns of violence came the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, which inadvertently ushered decades of carnage bracketed by the two world wars and destroyed the old regime in Europe.
Chapter 8 returns to the theoretical model to discuss the dynamics of continuous campaigns of political violence and draw the policy implications of the model for both the prevention of political violence or, failing that, the termination of campaigns of political violence in liberal democracies. In the appendix, I present evidence that the model is generalizable to even the recent global neojihadi campaigns of violence by testing it in an expanded sample of campaigns of political violence. I also compare it against two alternative explanations for the turn to political violence, namely the ideological thesis and rational choice theory, the reigning paradigm in political science.
Methodology
It is unfortunately quite common for studies on political violence to dive into the subject without providing an outline of methodology, resulting in a series of narratives, often based on secondary sources and told in an authoritative voice, to illustrate the author's claims. There is no acknowledgment that many facts in such tales are deeply contested, undermining their validity. Here I outline my methodology and discuss the scope and limitations of this study.
This book combines three strategies to understand the process of turning to political violence. First, Chapter 1 outlines this process by deductively deriving it from cognitive and social psychological theories. Second, the major part of the book presents detailed descriptions of campaigns of political violence, which illustrate the model I present and sometimes compare it to popular alternative explanations. These descriptions generate inductive generalizations about this process that, in turn, guided me to the relevant theories that framed the deductions of the first chapter. Third, the appendix tests this model empirically by adding other campaigns of political violence to the ones already discussed.
This book is an exploration trying to identify variables and processes relevant to the turn to political violence. As in all science, its findings are at best temporary, tentative, and incomplete. Nevertheless, I hope that the reader will realize that they are based on much more extensive historical and comparative data than previous works, covering two centuries, two continents, multiple goals, ideologies, and social settings. The theoretical framework presented in the next chapter also provides a deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms in turning to political violence. Previous discussions of terrorism have too often been based on few facts and many prejudices, and lacked any systematic methodology. I hope that this book will contribute to raising the quality of discourse on non-state political violence.
In the second part of this study, I analyze a series of incidents of political violence, defined broadly, and lump them into campaigns of violence. The aim is to elaborate causal mechanisms and conditions for this complex process of turning to violence. Within each instance, I trace this process, moving from original conditions to the outcome, political violence. For each case, I use a within-case analysis, comparing people before and after their turn to violence, using them as their own control group, in an attempt to understand their journey. I also compare them to their peers who did not turn to political violence in a loose approximation of a control group, to identify the specific factors distinguishing them from their controls. I also compare cases to each other to understand their commonalities and differences. This approach therefore combines qualitative within-case and cross-case analysis. Incidents of political violence often come in larger campaigns, which give meaning to each of their incidents. Therefore, on this collective level of analysis, I conduct a within-campaign analysis comparing politically violent clusters before and after their turn to violence as well as cross-group analysis comparing them with their larger nonviolent political protest communities to understand their violent emergence from their original communities.
Process tracing requires detailed and reliable data on the turn to political violence. The lack of comprehensive open source data on recent political violence required to test the model led me to turn to historical cases, where the evidence is available to scholars. Before speculating about the process of turning to political violence, we need to know the facts. Much of the historiography of terrorism relies on superficial interpretations of deeply contested facts. I have reconstructed the relevant events mostly from primary sources into detailed narratives and hope that this may serve as a source book for future research.
There are two major perspectives on violent actors: the usual outsider stance from out-group observers and an insider one from in-group members. All too often, terrorism scholars take the outside perspective of the state, reducing terrorists into stereotypes. This adversarial strategy impedes insightful understanding of perpetrators and results in a re-hashing of counter-terrorists' prejudices, full of unexamined assumptions, which masquerades as social science. It comforts the readers by stressing their essential differences from terrorists.
To study what leads people to turn to political violence requires at least some understanding of what is going on in their minds, a peek into their subjectivity. The investigation needs to proceed from an insider's point of view. This study does not assume that people are completely self-aware, as social science has documented for at least half a century the wide gap between what people believe or say and what they do. However, we should at least consider their own insights, without necessarily taking their words at face value, as they may very well try to deceive us. Their words are only a starting point for this inquiry, for we cannot conduct participant observation, which is illegal or inadvisable even if possible. Participation in political violence is against the law in most countries and severely punished. From a scientific perspective, it is inadvisable, as shown by Bill Buford's cautionary tale of his attempt to understand soccer hooligans in England, which resulted in him becoming one of them. Participation involves the danger of identifying with one's subjects and, in this case, actually becoming a terrorist and losing one's ability to observe in an unbiased way. Surreptitious observation is now possible with various types of recording devices, but they did not exist at the time of most the cases in this study.
Political violence in this study is deliberate: it is meaningful and intentional for the perpetrators. The turn to political violence is embedded with meaning for them. To capture this meaning and more generally the actors' subjectivity requires a detailed description of the incident, in contrast with the superficial coding of large databases available for terrorism research. Such databases do not capture the significance of the act for the perpetrators. In contrast, this inquiry aims to go beyond the bare facts and provide details, context, emotions, meanings, and significance of the act for the actor as well as the web of interactions among actors. Through this meaning, the analysis brings the context and relevant social structural features into the process under study. The empirical chapters attempt to accurately describe and interpret social actions within the context in which they happen.
The strategy is to analyze perpetrators' actions from an insider perspective, the opposite strategy of the vast majority of terrorist studies. This puts the reader within the context of meanings of the act in order to understand it. There is an understandable reluctance for readers to adopt this perspective, for they might feel that they are indifferent to the suffering of the victims. Nevertheless, an insider understanding of perpetrators is necessary and the first step for prevention of violence. Without perpetrators, there is no political violence. It is therefore crucial to develop an adequate understanding of the actor, from his or her perspective, to understand political violence and select appropriate interventions to prevent it.
To capture the subjectivity of political actors, one must rely on their words and actions rather than just their ideology. Their relevant words and actions are the accounts generated by the actors themselves about their paths to violence. It is important to focus on the violent actors themselves and not just the ideologues of their communities. The two are often confused, and many scholars substitute the ideologues' rationales for the motivations of the actual perpetrators. The perpetrators' accounts are found in primary sources, and one of the major tasks in this study was to collect them to generate the detailed descriptions in the following chapters.
I searched for archival material where perpetrators' voices were recorded, either in trial transcripts where their testimony was recorded, articles they authored, diaries they recorded, interviews they gave, or letters or memoirs they wrote. For each case, I attempted to reconstruct the meaning imbedded in the context of the violence. I tried to capture the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the conspirators when they became politically active, when they turned to political violence, and sometimes when they disengaged from it. In short, I tried to understand terrorism from the ground up. I assume that violence is an extension of how they made sense of their social world and thought about themselves in it, especially with respect to members of their group and enemies. I focused on the emergence and evolution of these groups within their respective social movements. How did they conceptualize what they were doing within their ideological context, structure of opportunities, and constraints they were facing to accomplish their goal? What was the emerging sense of shared social identity within their respective groups and in comparison to their enemies, especially when this identity was threatened? What was their relationship with allies and people on behalf of whom they were acting? Again, it is crucial to understand their view of salient out-groups that helped define them. For many, these out-group members were the agents of the state, such as high government officials or the police threatening them. For anarchists and workers, these out-groups also included the bourgeoisie—factory owners and financiers. These out-groups became the targets of their violence.
However, with the possible exception of diaries and contemporaneous letters, where the actor records all his or her passing thoughts, these accounts are problematic, for they had a specific purpose and were not always accurate records of events for posterity. They were intentionally composed to address an audience with a specific agenda: a prosecutor, a judge, an imagined future public, relatives at home—the author wanted to influence these specific audiences in a certain way. The surviving archival traces often focus on theoretical or ideological justification for violence. Indeed, much research on political violence concentrates on how these justifications evolved over time according to experience and context. This is because such documents are what is left from history, and they privilege ideology as a motivation for political violence. This methodological artifact gave rise to the assumption that, by looking at the justifications, one can understand violence. I believe that this is not enough to recreate the relevant subjectivity of the actors. In a sense, our job starts where the documents end. The key is to transcend the biased accounts left by the actors trying to justify what they did or by their enemies trying to discredit and condemn these same acts. By the nineteenth century, most Western systems of jurisprudence gave voice to both sides of a trial and allowed actors to explain themselves within that context. The researcher sifting through these legal documents, must understand their origin and intent, and try to reconstruct how the actors felt, thought, and behaved leading up to and at the time of the violence.
Many historical accounts left behind are self-serving. Even in the few instances when the writer tried to be as honest as possible, his or her memories were full of unconscious or sometimes deliberate distortions. These sources must be handled with caution, but this is not an impossible task, thanks to the emerging understanding of some of the normal cognitive distortions of memory and thinking. These biases can also be dealt with through corroboration in the analysis of the data. Nevertheless, retrospective memory must be viewed with at least some skepticism, as people reinterpret their past actions in light of their present beliefs. For instance, people often retrospectively explain their decision to join an ideological or religious group in terms of its ideas and neglect the importance of social bonding, which field studies have demonstrated to be one of the most important factors in that process.
Even under the best circumstances, people view the same events differently, generating conflicting evidence. I let actors speak for themselves by trying to find contemporaneous quotes indicating their state of mind at the time. Getting a real flavor of their thoughts through quotes helps in understanding how they viewed themselves in their particular context. Sometimes, actors lived long enough to write memoirs, which gave a hint of their motivations at the time. However, memoirs and memory as a whole may be deceiving, as they often reconstruct personal history in as favorable light as possible for the writer. This must be taken into account as well. Most often, narrators skip over events that might not fit into the image they want to project at the time of writing. Nevertheless, these recollections are our only window into their minds and cannot be completely discounted, and so I have treated them as simple data points for the narrative.
Relatively few subjects of this study left autobiographical accounts behind. People who survived their acts of political violence were often captured and tried, and judges and juries were always interested in what motivated the defendants to commit such horrible acts. Trial testimonies and pre-trial interrogations, which allowed the defendants to explain their actions and the meaning these actions had for them, probably constitute the largest source of information for this study. The recent posting of such material online, especially for the French cases, courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, greatly facilitated the collection of relevant trial transcripts. Testimonies in Russian were also widely reported and translated into English or French. Of course, such material must be viewed with caution, as defendants tried to diminish their culpability in court or simply use the courtroom for propaganda purposes. Therefore, each piece of archival material was evaluated in terms of who was speaking to whom, for what purpose, and under what circumstances. After this assessment, I analyzed each piece in terms of what it indicated about that person's turn to political violence. In many cases, the defendants who had been caught in flagrant délit knew that they faced the most severe penalties, no matter what, and decided to provide a fairly plausible and comprehensive account of their trajectory to political violence. These accounts are instructive because they dispel many of the common beliefs about people committing such acts.
Despite my attempts to collect as much data as possible for each incident, only fragments of evidence survived. I do not know whether these fragments were representative of what these actors thought and felt or if I missed some significant pieces of information. Nevertheless, this book covers the subjectivity of the subject actors in these campaigns of violence in greater detail than others have attempted before. Although no new ground is broken here and no new source of evidence discovered, I brought together in one volume material that was scattered in many different places. While scientific research is never perfect or complete, it does try to further one's understanding of a given subject. The hope is that this deeper scrutiny might uncover some patterns that have been overlooked as well as test competing explanations of the process of turning to political violence.
The uneven documentation imposes its own rhythm on the construction of the narrative of past events. Sometimes, there is a lot of information, lots of testimony and documents, and here the description is rich and thick. These dense periods are interspersed with much longer intervals when there is very little left, leaving large gaps in our understanding. This emphasizes short bursts of dramatic events over longer, mundane periods in the lives of militants, when, overshadowed by competing social identities such as being a loving spouse, parent, or trusted friend, political identity and activities waned. I left these gaps alone and resisted the temptation to fill them with unwarranted speculations. The result is a narrative that collapses these long periods and strings together significant events in the actor's retrospective self-understanding. Although these uneventful periods did not play a significant role in the actor's understanding of him- or herself and the outside world around him, they probably contributed to the turn to violence. For instance, happily married and working people without grievances usually do not get involved in violent protest politics. These two mundane conditions may be the most significant factors in keeping people from traveling down the path to political violence, but scholars often neglect to mention their absence in favor of dramatic events that provide a more sensational and superficial explanation of their turn to violence. Therefore, it is important to collect as much information in as much detail as possible to reconstruct a narrative of events that will help us trace the process of turning to political violence. The many gaps in the historical evidence interfering with our understanding of this process impose a substantial limitation of this study.
People also react more to recent events than to long-past events. Too many studies of terrorists collapse time, leading to erroneous causal attribution of behavior to long-forgotten events, like childhood "traumas" and slights to family honor evolving into indelible obsessions that the child avenges in adulthood. Such pathological long-term childhood obsessions are rare and seldom the cause of political violence. The very few cases of murderous obsessions described in the present study were generated in adulthood.
When I started this historical exploration into what led people to turn to political violence, it was clear that most of them acted as part of a conspiracy or were inspired by a political community that gave meaning to their action. It makes more sense to treat the conspiracy or incident itself as the unit of analysis rather than the individual narratives of each of the conspirators. Even loners, except for those suffering from mental disorders, were connected to a political community; their individual actions can be understood only within the web of meanings of this subculture and their relationships to in-group and out-group members. The aim, then, is to create a nuanced account of the evolution of each plot, a collective story rather than a collection of individual tales. The collective stories take place within a specific subculture of common history, tradition, norms, and values, creating shared social identities defined in comparison to relevant out-groups and existing within specific social, political, and economic conditions. These stories are also accounts of cooperation, mutual influence, and other emergent factors of group life, which must be included in the narrative. Overall, the cases come in clusters within a given historical community, a campaign of political violence, so to speak. I describe each of these campaigns of political violence in a narrative structure, paying close attention to chronology. I believe that only a narrative approach can hope to capture the drama and meanings of the various plots constituting a campaign of political violence. The stories of these campaigns form the six empirical chapters of this book.
The requirement for adequate and reliable data necessary to support a detailed description needed for process-tracing forced me to focus primarily on countries that held legal proceedings that allowed defendants to speak for themselves and recorded their words. This limits the scope of inquiry to Western countries, creating narrow geographical and historical boundaries for this study and precluding the selection of cases that may constitute a different type of political violence, such as the campaigns in colonies struggling for independence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonial powers rarely bothered to leave behind extensive records of these campaigns from the challengers' perspective; they simply tried to eliminate them without much concern about their civil rights. The neglect of anti-colonial campaigns of violence is another serious limitation in this study, because they represent the type of cases that achieved the greatest percentage of political success, namely independence from foreign rulers. However, this political outcome has not been necessarily due to the violence, as demonstrated by the successful, generally nonviolent campaign for independence in the Indian sub-continent. People there were not especially peaceful, as shown by the massive bloodbaths from Hindu-Muslim communal riots during the partition of the sub-continent. Independence was granted for complex political reasons in the metropolitan capitals, and violence did not seem to have been the determining factor in this decision. I invite other scholars to fill this gap of campaigns of political violence for independence with solid evidence.
The history of political violence in this study shows that violent political actors in the West generally modeled themselves on predecessors, establishing some continuity from the French Revolution, the regicides of the nineteenth century, People's Will, anarchists in Europe and America, Russian socialist revolutionaries, and Young Bosnia. They rarely referred to the long struggle of the Irish to gain independence from Britain, and therefore I did not include this otherwise extremely important instance of political violence in this book. Let me repeat, I have not attempted to write a comprehensive survey of political violence in the past two centuries. Instead, I have accumulated historical illustrations for the model described in the next chapter, which amount to a history of the turn to indiscriminate political violence. Fortunately, my linguistic limitations—English and French—did not force me to narrow the scope of this book since there is abundant documentation of Russian populists and socialist revolutionaries in both languages enabling me to incorporate them into this study. I ended this study when political violence, which over the nineteenth century had been careful to avoid unnecessary deaths, became indiscriminate with the targeting of civilians around World War I.
Although the inspiration for the study was the current global neojihadi campaign of violence in the West, I wanted temporarily to stay away from violence carried out in the name of Islam because of the present contentious debate on the importance of Islamist ideology in contributing to violence. Instead of contributing to this polemical mudslinging, I decided to look at history to assess the importance of ideology and more generally the model presented of the turn to political violence in different contexts and on a very different set of data before returning to more recent campaigns of violence in the appendix. I hope the reader will gain some insights from these historical campaigns that may facilitate a fresh look at the present violence.
Seeringly honest and courageous, an absolutely brilliantly written book about the descent into painkiller addiction that can so easily occur when someone is dealing with unbearable physical and emotional pain. This book should be read by every doctor and mental health practitioner for its unwavering insights into the psychology of addiction. A brave, heartfelt and extraordinary book―Corinne Sweet, author of Overcoming Addiction, psychologist and broadcaster
A brilliantly written book . . . It's not only an inspirational addiction recovery story but also a deeply moving book about recovering from loss on many levels - health, love, independence, career, dignity, trust, optimism . . . Cathryn's story gripped me at gut level from page one―Gael Lindenfield
An honest and eye-opening account of a problem that is affecting increaing numbers of people in the UK―Northern Echo
An incredible story from wreckage to redemption―Carol Geer, Psychotherapist
Compelling and highly topical―Bookseller
Frankly written, Kemp's courageous memior will help those dealing with an addict, or with addiction itself―Big Issue (North)
Cathryn Kemp is a journalist and travel writer. She was a journalist for The People, News of the World, The Sunday Mirror and the Mirror for seven years before falling ill literally overnight in 2004. She has written several Lonely Planet books, including Romania and Moldov;, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; Eastern Europe, and Europe on a Shoestring.
