PositiveThe Washington PostKleinfeld presents a powerful account of the \'stumbling, staggering journey\' needed to reduce large-scale violence, and provides detailed and informative portraits of successful examples—what she calls \'happy stories\'—from the United States, India, Colombia, Georgia and Sicily. By analyzing violence rather than an abstract notion of war, Kleinfeld offers an alternative way to understand contemporary wars distinct from the typical geopolitical perspectives of policymakers. In other words, her analysis treats war as a social problem in which political and criminal violence are intertwined ... Not all of her proposals are convincing ... Kleinfeld might have put more emphasis on the importance of justice, since attempts to achieve it appear throughout her story in the efforts of the constitutional court in Colombia, the Supreme Court in the United States and the Italian prosecutors who bravely took on the Mafia. Yet her book remains significant for the thrust of its argument: the need for complex social transformation in the struggle against the savage order ... The prescriptions Kleinfeld proposes for contending with a breakdown in norms—such as greater engagement of the middle class and the importance of political movements—offer valuable insight
