I am the translator for this book, so naturally I may be counted as biased, but I enjoyed the essays so much that I want to urge others to explore them. Richard Swartz was the Eastern European correspondent for the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet for many years. His intimate acquaintance with day-to-day life in the various cultures of Eastern Europe (including Albania) and his status as an observer from a small and (mostly) neutral country make his observations unique among those I have read. Add to these qualities his eloquent and moving prose style, and you have a wonderful book, part travelogue, part personal essay, all closely observed and sensitively portrayed. Often moving and/or funny. I recommend it warmly.

This book has, I think, three different parts or points of view; the first is well worth, and these is the good documentation about the theme of aerial bombing, abundant and accurate.
But the other two parts are very debatable: one is the resource and constant citation of the horrors of aerial bombing... but obtained not from reality, but from rare cheap novels or fiction books of unknow authors or almost, forgotten nowadays; the main of these works are chaotic and terrible dreams about wars between races, a little in the style of the feverish fantasies of the yellow hordes of Fu- Manchu or something else, there's plenty of Death Rays, rare bombs and flying machines never seen in real life.
And finally, I find another default, and is the accusation for making war, colonial or not, to countries as England, Japan, USA, France, Spain, Italy, etc. This critique I believe, is easy to do from a country as Sweden with an economy and geography that have protected it from the main conflicts of the twentieth century, but not everybody has so much luck, and even the conduct of these country during the II World War with is peculiar neutrality could at last be revised.

As far as I can tell, all the reviewers agree that sven lindqvist has done some incredible research for this book. He does envision a world without war. While most people cannot imagine such a world, this book is written in a way that encourages the reader to see that history unfolds in unpredictable ways. Things that once seemed commonplace now seem CRAZY, and ideas that once seemed crazy now seem commonplace. I think that the reviewer who says that the white on white bombing of WWII contradicts Lindqvist's ideas about the racialism of aerial bombing's social history has missed the point. Lindqvist shows that history only reached this point because earlier europeans who were using bombs to subdue their colonies could not really IMAGINE white on white bombing, so they did not support laws that would outlaw or regulate aerial bombing. A lack of imagination can be a terrible thing. Although all of us suffer from a lack of imagination at times, this book gave me hope. I hope that future generations will see war as an absurd and antiquated phenomena. That would be cool, don't you think?

... That such people disapprove of this book makes me proud to number it among my favorites. Alright, alright, I WILL focus on the book but I'm allowing myself some potshots.The book is unabashedly pacifist but not so at the expense of intellectual rigor. It is a fair critique that the author has an anti-war bias, so S.O.F. types need look no further unless they are interested in, God forbid, understanding a point of view that might disagree with their own and learning a thing or two. Rather than prattle on in the usual bleeding heart hyperbole the author presents an almost legalistic case for his ideas. He is anti-war, but it is important to note what KIND of war the he inveighs against in this book, namely, the large-scale killing of civilians from the air simply because they ARE civilians, not merely of the other side, but of a lesser, somehow inhuman, group of beings. This is where the author's chilling insight into the strategic bombing mindset is most profound. A previous reviewer implies that though large-scale bombing of civilians began in WW1 it should be exempt from the book because it was only "white on white." What this fails to recall about the actual point of the book is: the author argues that such a thing happened precisely because the European powers were able to think of each other in an almost racist fashion. Racism, or more accurately, dehumanization, is the necessary step in this scenario. He presents evidence that this process with had begun with the pre-WW1 use of bombing against civilians in colonial uprisings and was only accelerated between the wars and afterwards.The author's main premise is that an inhumane mindset, be it racist, colonial, or what have you, is a prerequisite for the acceptance of the bombing the civilians by governments or by individuals, whether passively or actively. I don't think the author would argue with the assertion that 9/11 was a direct consequence of such a mindset, further, that Gen. Curtis LeMay and Osama bin Laden might have something in common: they both showed complete disregard for the lives of innocents in the accomplishment of their strategic goals. What is most compelling about the book is the way it demonstrates thoughout history the temptation to use bombing simply because one can; how early Science Fiction racist pulp novel fantasies had an ugly way of coming true, in some form, all through the 20th century, much the same way "The Turner Diaries" were horrifically actualized at Oklahoma City.Apart from all the rubarb of whether any of this is gospel truth, the author has a fascinating and truly poetic way of trying to prove a point. The book flows in fragments and you are forced to read it in pieces by jumping around from numbered section to numbered section instead of page by numbered page, like you were reading random articles from a newspaper. I have'nt read it yet "out of order," that is, by page number in sequence, but I think it must be something like a vast version of "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, only much more heart- breaking and closer to home.If you are interested in an invigorating, disturbing (no matter what side of the political fence you read from) and thought-provoking read, give this book a chance.