Stripping Bare the Body

Mark Danner
October 2009     ISBN: 156858413X

Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world and written by one of the world's leading writers, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter century. From bloody battleground to dark prison cell to air-conditioned office, it tells the grim and compelling tale of the true final years of the American Century, as the United States passed from the violent certainties of the late Cold War, to the ideological confusions of the post-Cold War world, to the pumped up and ongoing evangelism of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, and the ruins they have left behind.

Moving from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo to suicide bombing in the suburban neighborhoods of Baghdad, to torture in the secret "black site" prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to the political deal making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting in Washington and New York and Langley, Stripping Bare the Body shows the considerations of a wide range of policymakers, and the minute effects their decisions, and their mistakes, have on people in distant places and on Americans as they live and work in "the indispensable nation." Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a "grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams."

Stripping Bare the Body is a book of stories telling how politics–and its handmaidens: violence and war–is practiced in the brutal worlds of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, the "black sites" and Washington, D.C. It shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner, then on assignment for The New Yorker in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, "Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin."

Click here to see the details of Danner's multi-city book tour.

"Mark Danner is leading journalism's improbable Renaissance–showing, page after page, that the elegantly reasoned argument, supported by indisputable facts and presented with passion and ingenuity, can still hone ideals into a sharp sword of action. This book is must-reading for anyone who hopes to understand our era of peril and possibility."
–Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize winner and author, The Way of the World

"Mark Danner has truly chronicled what Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, called 'the dark places of the earth,' some of which are uncomfortably close to home. He has returned with tales to tell that are vivid, eloquent, heartbreaking and show a steady moral compass. This extraordinary book will long endure, and should be bedside reading for President Obama."
–Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains

"With this vivid and deeply disturbing book, Mark Danner affirms his standing as our preeminent guide to the world's broken places, littered with the detritus of American carelessness and delusions."
–Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

Mark Danner has reported on and written about foreign affairs, politics and war for 25 years. For many years, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include The Secret Way to War, Torture and Truth, The Road to Illegitimacy and The Massacre at El Mozote. Danner is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and the James Clarke Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He divides his time between New York and Berkeley.