Book Reviews
How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them
By Barbara F. Walter
Crown Books, 9780593137789
If anyone has the background and the credentials to write authoritatively on civil wars, it is Barbara F. Walter. She is the Rohr Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy at the University of California, San Diego. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was invited to join the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) in 2017. PITF compiles “data from around the world with the purpose of identifying with predictability where instability was (sic) likely to occur.” Walter realized that “the warning signs of instability… I’d begun to see on our own soil.” Walter notes that the civil wars of the present are distinctly different from those of the past. Contemporary “civil wars are waged primarily by different ethnic and religious groups, by guerilla soldiers and militias, who often target civilians.”
Most Americans cannot imagine another civil war in their country. They assume our democracy is too resilient, too robust to devolve into conflict. Or they assume that our country is too wealthy and advanced to turn on itself.
Walter came to realize that “Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable, they follow a script.” Of marked concern for her is that America has begun manifesting those scripted characteristics; two examples, the Whitmer kidnapping plot and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Some view those examples as isolated. Walter realized otherwise. In her significant book, Walter escorts the reader through the steps and characteristics of events that escalate predictably toward civil war. She illustrates those marked similarities using the examples of Bosnia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Northern Ireland, and Israel.
Walter does not conclude her concern with those detailed similarities. Her articulation evolves beyond that to discussion of how we can thwart and interrupt the deterioration toward full-blown civil war.
South Africa was closer to civil war in 1989 than the United States is today. …Violence often springs from a sense of injustice, inequality, and insecurity—and a sense that those grievances and fears will not be addressed by the current system. But systems can change. No one thought that white South Africa would reform a system designed specifically to cement their dominance. But when the costs of maintaining that domi-nance became too high, and business leaders who were hurt by sanctions insisted on reform, they dismantled it. …So can the United States.
Barbara Walter shares examples that keep hope and options for something better. Her concluding words are:
America, I have to believe, is not at the end of its history. It is at the beginning of a remarkable new era, when we will have the chance to live up to our founding motto—E Pluribus Unum—where out of many, we will become one.
This volume deserves careful, thoughtful reading.
—Ned Haggard
The Coveted
By Laura Jane Round, Cerasus Poetry (UK) cerasuspoetry.com, 979-8462246623
Laura Jane Round’s chapbook, The Coveted, is interesting, fresh, and original. And it works splendidly with images and metaphors that on initial reading sometimes seem nearly incomprehensibly mysterious, but almost like a reality gaining detail as it appears out of a morning’s mist; their value all but speaks aloud. The fresh images work and reveal. What impresses is not just the story of the poem, but the simultaneous awareness that you are meeting the poet as person and woman. In the particular, the broader value is revealed. Suddenly, one realizes that this is not only a practiced poet but a visceral talent, one born truly gifted.
Boys wrinkle noses
Smell fear seat and steroid cream
Circle us
Widen the hole, the hole, the hole
We trip into it and they laugh
Vulgar and unrestrained
They are owned, too…
Under grinding gears and fossil fuels Sleeping with holy water blinds our eyes
I want lipstick and they give me whitener
So I want knives and they give me mascara So I clutch my pearls as they drop into the hole One by One
The Coveted is an expression of evolution, the evolution of a young woman moving from a child’s youthful enchantment and innocence to a progressive expansion into the realm of womanhood both as individual and social being, at times uneasily as object. It is an expression of searching, searching not for self so much as the pathway serving reality without loss of dignity, keeping faith with expansive identity and the genuine vitality inherent within possibility and perhaps someday, love.
I am my own shining kingdom
They cannot hurt us yet
And it makes the bones of me hurt
and hasten for fixes
That I, of all the girls in the world looked up In this perfect moment
In this perfect symmetry
Your hands reaching for a pencil sharpener The thump of a keyboard and the
schoolchild hymn
I’m 10 years old and you are everything I need.
The Coveted progresses in telling selections of “education” both formal, “’Walk properly’/Curling in shoes I can’t tie yet/And I bite my lip in frustration,” and learned of living:
Like elixir on his shirtsleeve.
He tastes
He hungers
I smile
I bolt
I will never be enough
For high school boys.
As the reader of these wonderful, image-rich yet faithfully stark expressions of a young, female poet’s evolution from child to adult, we witness her progression from the uncertain and vulnerable to the wizened and realized. She gains strength without be-coming hardened. We, the readers, progress and grow in companion awareness with her. The poems do not speak a tale but become a singular journey, poet and reader virtually as one. That measure of accomplishment in a poet so young is a marker, great talent lives within and will progressively grow in step with time.
I get painted in Montmartre by
a grey lady, stout
And short in a worn-out man’s hat, cigarette clamped
Between her teeth. She is radiant
I see Salvador and Frida.
We have coffee afterwards,
you do not let me pay. I look past
The girls modelling Paris and see the old, vibrant, well-dressed women
Spread out across their Parisian elegant chairs. They eat and laugh
whether they are ugly or not, and they are strawberries and cream,
I refocus on you, only you, red hair blazing over shining white backdrops.
—Ned Haggard
