Peter Herman’s expansive study causes us to question and reconsider what we think we know about terrorism and about those who engage in such acts. The range of the text − from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 – highlights the paradoxical impulses (to speak and not to speak) at the heart of any narrative about terrorism. -- Tim Gauthier, University of Nevada, Las VegasThis is a must-read book for anybody interested in the cultural interpretation of terrorism. By zooming in on the speakability/unspeakability paradox, characteristic of acts of terrorism, Peter Herman succeeds in revealing how literature and film create a counter-narrative that undoes simplistic ideological interpretations of political violence. His readings demonstrate how the possible worlds of fiction and film create a triangulating discourse that runs counter to the reductive us-versus-them rhetoric, current in journalistic and political interpretations of terrorist events. -- Kristiaan Versluys, Ghent University, BelgiumPeter Herman’s book is a fine demonstration of what the humanities might provide to the study of terrorism, usually left to social sciences...Historians and literary and film scholars, in particular, will find the book a welcome addition, but one might hope that terror experts in the social sciences will read it for a new perspective from the humanities for understanding terrorist events in their human complexity. --Ann Larabee, Modern PhilologyFor Herman writers of fiction ‘have always offered us the tools for a better understanding of terrorism. We just need to pay attention.’ This scholarly, insightful, and illuminating book gives these writers their due attention, and it also shows how the one-dimensional representations it critiques have too often obscured our historical understanding of terrorism, and too often left us dangerously blind in one eye. -- Matthew Carr, Infernal Machine
