Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world,Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter-century, as told by one of the world’s leading writers.

A newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner 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.” This stark truth came to haunt Danner, especially after the president was overthrown in a bloody coup d’état.

Stripping Bare the Body moves from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo, to suicide bombings in the suburbs of Baghdad, to torture in the secret “black site” prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to political deal-making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington and New York and Langley. Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a “grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.”