| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeffory A. Clymer. America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 277. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95.

Terrorism's peculiar combination of attack and propaganda make it spectacularly compelling. Since September 11, 2001, Americans have struggled to understand terrorism; in the process they have resuscitated long-dormant narratives from the country's collective past. Jeffory A. Clymer's book, largely written before that date, provides a timely reminder that terrorism has played a dramatic role in modern U.S. history. "Terrorism is word and deed, symbol and substance," Clymer writes, "a form of action whose sheer outrageousness may awe us into silence, but which also compels us to attempt to regain our mental balance by groping toward a narrative structure in which the tragic events can be understood, even if they still make no sense to us" (p. 211, emphasis in original). Since the discovery of dynamite in 1866 made possible the mass killing of seemingly random targets, terrorism and terrorists have loomed large in the American imagination.

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