The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia - Hardcover

Walter LaFeber, Tisch University Professor, Cornell University In this stunningly original account of the West's contradictory love affair over the past century with both the idea of progress and the supposed benefits of mass violence, one of our most distinguished authors utilizes beautifully realized biographical sketches of leading and lesser-known twentieth-century figures to warn that this terrible love affair has direct, tragic meaning for our post-9/11 world.

Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution A work that combines intellectual courage, passion, and discipline. By connecting the dots among a dozen or so emblematic lives -- and by tying together the insights he has accumulated during his own long career as an astute and eloquent commentator on politics and international affairs -- Pfaff helps make sense of the uniquely brutal century that has now passe into history and draws lessons for the one just begun.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. William Pfaff is a master at relating ideas and politics. The Bullet's Song illuminates our understanding of the violent twentieth century through fascinating studies of intense people at the mercy of intense ideas. If we wish to avoid the last century's utopian disasters, The Bullet's Song offers invaluable lessons for the future.

William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism William Pfaff is brilliant, intriguing, and disturbing in this deep history of how our modern political civilization became a machine for massive killing. Millions of lives were -- still are -- sacrificed to the romantic longings of left and right for utopian futures. This dread disease may yet be curable, he guardedly allows, but this would require revival of a distinctly unmodern quality -- a sense of humility toward mortal existence itself.

James Chace, author of 1912 William Pfaff has given us a classic for our time -- beautifully written, deeply moving, and indispensable to our understanding of a world now threatened by terrorism and utopian ideologies.

If the past is prologue, one can read in The Bullet's Song the story of the roots of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism that took the lives of hundreds of millions in Europe and Asia in the 20th century, affected the United States radically, and which goes directly to the terrorism and violence of the Middle East today. Pfaff begins with the Italian Futurists of the 1920s, who glorified war and embraced Benito Mussolini, who militarized Italy and combined nationalism with socialism--the two most volatile innovations of the century.