Against Us or Beyond the Body Farm

Against Us: The New Face of America's Enemies in the Muslim World

Author: Jim Sciutto

In 2002 Jim Sciutto began filing in-depth reports on the Middle East for ABC News. Now, after nearly 100 assignments in Muslim countries, Sciutto brings back this disturbing truth: the Al-Qaeda–inspired view of an evil America bent on destroying Islam has moved from the fringes to the mainstream. Today, a surprising number of America’s enemies are not wild-eyed fanatics, but moderates—often middle-class and well educated, frequently young, many motivated by political convictions more than religious belief.

Sciutto profiles a cross-section of people in the Arab world, including a former Al-Qaeda jihadi turned electrician in Saudi Arabia, a Jordanian college student willing to risk his life by killing Americans in Baghdad, a Christian woman who supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, bitter pro-democracy advocates in Egypt who feel betrayed by the United States, and British-born Muslim terrorists living in London. The result is an alarming portrait of the depth and scope of anti-American sentiment.

Opposing America has become the unifying rallying cry for a rapidly growing pan-Arab nationalist movement. Conspiracy theories abound as Muslims begin to feel they are targeted by America, their political autonomy sabotaged. The Iraq war has become one of the most powerful recruiting tools for enemies of the United States.

Yet there is hope for America to turn the tide of hate. Sciutto talks with a young female student in Afghanistan who is cautiously optimistic that the United States will not fail her country in the rebuilding effort—and with a reformed jihadi in London who is finding ways to counsel young British Muslims away from their hatred ofAmerica. Democratic ideals are still held in high esteem, even as America’s perceived actions against Muslims are not.

Against Us is an urgent wake-up call for all Americans—and in particular those charged with formulating U.S. foreign policy—to rebuild relations with the Arab world and restore confidence in American values.

Publishers Weekly

A foreign correspondent for ABC News, Sciutto examines and explains the increasingly negative attitudes toward the United States among citizens of Muslim and Arab countries in this deeply insightful book. Structured around interviews conducted in the Middle East and the U.K., the book offers ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that anti-American sentiment-once the province of fringe groups-has gone mainstream, becoming in effect, a form of Middle Eastern nationalism, uniting moderates and radicals, Muslims and Christians for whom "freedom implies the freedom from American interference." Sciutto weaves together interviews with historical background, poll data and personal experience in this consistently informative and captivating account. In the strongest interviews, including one with a young, reform-minded Iranian activist and another with an Iraqi doctor, the book sets intense, sometimes horrifying experiences against a complicated and changing political backdrop. The author makes a few amorphous foreign policy recommendations on the basis of his research, but the book is less interesting for what it reveals about American policy than for its empathetic and candid depiction of its subjects and their lives. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

ABC News senior foreign news correspondent Sciutto considers Muslim anger at America and offers muddled reflections. That the United States suffers from a toxic reputation among many Muslims, especially since the Iraq war and occupation, should surprise no one. The author, who began covering the Middle East only after 9/11, finds that anti-American feeling is disturbingly mainstream and takes the problem personally. Calling it "demoralizing," Sciutto admits, "the truth is that the hatred insults me. It may be an inherently American quality to believe our own hype, but I do." Despite this self-limiting premise, the book pursues the roots of the hatred and makes familiar indictments of the Bush administration's support for dictators, its diplomacy tailored to oil interests and its sanction of torture. Fresh insights and forward-looking prescriptions, however, are in scant supply. Sciutto does successfully explore an essential contradiction: Many Muslims view America as omnipotent, an ideal of sorts, but also as untrustworthy and disappointing, and that paradox breeds conspiracy theories. Looking at post-Iraq war security, reconstruction and political failures, they can't believe America could be so incompetent, concluding that it's all intentional. Well-cast thumbnail sketches of a "reformed" Saudi jihadist, an underground Iranian blogger, a disillusioned Iraqi trauma surgeon and an Afghan schoolgirl, among others, effectively humanize the problem. But profiling nine countries, Sciutto seems fully at ease in none. He clings to too few characters and renders their stories too thin. In the chapter on Lebanon, for example, his portrait of a 24-year-old Christian uncharacteristicallysympathetic to Hezbollah overwhelms the narrative and gives a distorted picture of the nation's intricate politics. When Sciutto was the only reporter embedded with U.S. Special Forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a prescient Green Beret predicted, "Today they're giving us the thumbs-up. Tomorrow they'll be giving us the finger." Five years later, this book gives disappointingly short shrift to the events and attitudes that forged the crucible of U.S.-Muslim dissonance. A missed opportunity.

New interesting textbook: Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy or The Geography of Tourism and Recreation Environment Place and Space

Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science

Author: Bill Bass

There is no scientist in the world like Dr. Bill Bass. A pioneer in forensic anthropology, Bass created the world's first laboratory dedicated to the study of human decomposition--three acres of land on a hillside in Tennessee where human bodies are left to the elements. His research at "the Body Farm" has revolutionized forensic science, helping police crack cold cases and pinpoint time of death. But during a forensics career that spans half a century, Bass and his work have ranged far beyond the gates of the Body Farm. In this riveting book, the bone sleuth explores the rise of modern forensic science, using fascinating cases from his career to take readers into the real world of C.S.I.

Some of Bill Bass's cases rely on the simplest of tools and techniques, such as reassembling--from battered torsos and a stack of severed limbs--eleven people hurled skyward by an explosion at an illegal fireworks factory. Other cases hinge on sophisticated techniques Bass could not have imagined when he began his career: harnessing scanning electron microscopy to detect trace elements in knife wounds; and extracting DNA from a long-buried corpse, only to find that the female murder victim may have been mistakenly identified a quarter-century before.

In Beyond the Body Farm, readers will follow Bass as he explores the depths of an East Tennessee lake with a twenty-first-century sonar system, in a quest for an airplane that disappeared with two people on board thirty-five years ago; see Bass exhume fifties pop star "the Big Bopper" to determine what injuries he suffered in the plane crash that killed three rock and roll legends on "the day the music died"; and join Bass as he works to decipher an ancient Persian death scene nearly three thousand years old. Witty and engaging, Bass dissects the methods used by homicide investigators every day, leading readers on an extraordinary journey into the high-tech science that it takes to crack a case.

Kirkus Reviews

One of the big names in the small but heavily trafficked field of forensic anthropology provides more cases for gruesome consideration. Assisted by co-writer Jefferson, Bass made a splash in 2003 with Death's Acre, an account of his decades of work in a grotesque but increasingly marketable field. Then the pair assumed the name Jefferson Bass to pen a pair of bestselling crime novels based on the doctor's exploits and named for the infamous "Body Farm" he runs at the University of Tennessee to study the sequence and timing of human decomposition. So they likely saw no reason why another nonfiction collection about long-putrefied corpses and race-the-clock hunts for killers should do any less well-and given the legions of TV- and mystery-obsessed junior forensic detectives out there, they're probably right. That doesn't mean this book is anything more than a cut-and-paste string of individual cases written up in prosaic prose. Bass's persona-well-meaning scholar who doesn't mind being dramatically whisked away from the university by law-enforcement types looking to solve a crime-is finely honed by this point and serves him well. The cases themselves are a mixed bag of deadly circumstances, from missing persons to an explosion at an illegal fireworks factory that strewed body parts everywhere. Bass even dug up the body of the Big Bopper to see if there was any truth to rumors that foul play caused the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. There's much to enjoy here, if you're the kind of reader who likes to know why it helps to x-ray bodies that have been burned down to the bone to hide evidence of foul play. Answer: Lead from a bullet sometimes melts in the heat,leaving streaks on bones. More morbid goodies for the C.S.I. set.