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How To Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, And The End Of The War On Terror (2009)

by Reza Aslan(Favorite Author)

3.97 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1400066727 (ISBN13: 9781400066728)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: An interesting, and surprisingly impartial, book speculating on what it takes to spur some religious people to wage war in the name of God, or to use the language of the book, to wage a 'cosmic war'.Far from concentrating solely on one religion, Aslan is clear to include religious extremists from Judaism and Christianity and how their bleiefs manifest themselves on their surroundings.The focus for the majority of the book is understandably on Islam which has itself been often scapegoated as being of an inherently terrorist nature, which is one of the topics Aslan covers.This is a quite eye-opening and interesting book which clears up the difference between a 'jihadist' and an 'islamist' - far from being synonymous, it turns out.There's possibly more in-depth analyses avail... moreible but for a personal, focused lucid read on the subject, you could do far worse than this book.
review 2: Clocking in at a brisk 175 pages (not counting citations and an index) the thesis of Reza Aslan's "How To Win a Cosmic War" can be boiled down to this: Until the United States stops framing the War on Terror in the same "good versus evil" terms as the violent jihadists we are fighting, we can never prevail. Thankfully, Aslan does flesh it out a bit more than that. Engaging in tone and quite readable, Aslan offers a condensed version of the history of mankind's "Cosmic Wars," those fought with the belief that God, Himself, is weighing on on one side or the other. He continues with the founding of the modern nation of Israel, the development of the Isaeli/Palestinian conflict and how those events relate to the cosmic struggle that is the modern jihadist movement.While it's definitely an interesting read, it did leave me saying "that's it?" when I found the last few dozen pages were the aforementioned index and notes. It gives me higher hopes for his first--and much meatier looking--book "No God But God," which I neglected to read, first. (Though, I get the feeling that, if I had, I might've been a bit more let down by this latest effort). less

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