Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

THis book was receommended in a blog that was debating the morality of force when collateral damage to non-combatants was a real possibility. To my shocked surprise, I found an intense, serious study of violence, freedom and "urgent means" (a euphemism for 'when nothing but force will do'). This is a single volume abridgement of a huge set of books and tends to be wordy and academic in places but well worth the time invested in reading. Examining the use of force in situations ranging from Napoleon to Stalin to the US War Between the States, the author explores the question of under what circumstances the use of violence may be justifiable. Even the advocates of non-violence such as Gandhi are not neglected in the discourse. There are no easy answers here and some of the discussion is frankly disturbing (as it should be, given the subject) but it is a masterful examination of why humans kill and the "moral calculus" they use to justify their actions.

I have to admit that I felt daunted by the seven volumes of this book and bought the abridged edition. It is astounding! What I found most valuable is not the specific rules Vollmann lays out for deciding whether violence is justified or not, but the detailed and thoughtful examinations of specific historical events and people: the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia; Napoleon, Stalin, Gandhi, and, most importantly, ordinary people who were victims or perpetrators of violence. Vollmann's writing is precise and eloquent and carries you so seamlessly from one page to the next that you don't realize until it's too late that you've reached the end of this 700-page volume. (And then you feel compelled to get your hands on the unabridged edition.) This is an immensely useful and revelatory book.

My experience reading RU & RD was more conventional; I read the volumes straight through. I have 2 hours of commuting on the subway each day so I get a lot of reading done. I started in May and finished volume seven in August with one month off while I was on vacation. I never found it tedious or repetitive. If one topic did not particularly excite me he would be on to another in 5 or 10 pages. The binding and slipcase is gorgeous. When my copy first arrived the slipcase had been damaged, but McSweeney's shipped me a new case free of charge- and I didn't even buy it from them. The only thing I can add which has not been covered by other reviewers is the photography. Vollman includes a couple dozen photos in each volume- i believe all of which he shot himself. They include shots of a friend of his who had just been killed by a sniper, a woman in columbia pointing to a bloodstain where her daughter was slain, child soldiers in Burma. I found the photos helped reinforced the reality of the exotic and often novelistically rendered personal experiences he offers in the second half of the book. I really enjoyed them. The other thing I find amazing is that Vollman is working on another seven volume book about the 'symbolic history of north america.' I would have thought this would be considered a lifes work.

I've been working on RU & RD for some time now. After reading the excerpt in McSweeney's 7 a few years ago, then reading a few hundred pages of manuscript on the advance disc I recieved, then a little more when I actually bought my copy...and now a few hundred more pages over the last week or so. This is a long winded way of conveying that there is a richness that is present in this set of volumes by William T. Vollman that is unbelievable to behold & exciting to own.I am so happy that I own a copy of this monumental book, and plan to keep it in a prominent position in my library to refer to as I desire. At first, I was thinking I would try to work through the book like any other, length be damned. But as time has worn on, I have taken Vollman's own advice to go to it when I want and read portions that I want...which has proven to be good advice. The book has so many layers, covers so broad a subject, it seems almost a crime to try & read it like a "normal" book from Vol. 1 through 6 (as well as the Moral Calculus). These books compliment any reading schedule that includes historical & other non-fiction works. As I float from book to book in my collection, I refer back to RU & RD for Vollmans experience or thoughts on some figure or idea. What makes the book so much more interesting than other historical studies is Vollman's fearless rendering of his feelings towards what he is writing about. This could be seen as dangerous, but one suspects that anyone buying this set of books has the ability to decide their position in relation to what they are reading. It is this relationship, between the reader's views and Vollman's in RU & RD, that makes reading this mammoth book so rewarding. I am so thankful to WTV for writing this, and to McSweeney's for publishing it when no one else would without compromise.If you are just contemplating this purchase, stop. Buy the book now before it is no longer available...I think the abridged version that comes out this year will be a sad shadow of this full version.

Something that I haven't seen in any of the reviews of Vollmann's book is this: "Am I going to want to read it?" After all, if you're spendng $120 or so on the thing, and you're interested in more that just looking at it on your bookshelf, it should be considered. Sure, Vollmann has written an important book by all accounts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to read it. Or even a quarter of it. Well, good news: Rising Up Rising Down is very readable; moreso I think that his recent novel Argall, on which I remain stuck on around page 350. The book does get heavy of course in its theories and efforts to explore the connections it needs to make. But the chapters themselves are usually very short, and few examples in it last so long that you lose interest. A few more pages and he'll be talking about something else in a different country and different time. I raced through the first volume, and half of the second. At that point I got sidetracked with some other things, but I can't wait to get back into it. In many cases you actually get nice short versions of difficult to understand historical events. For example, one hundred pages on what happened in the early Soviet Union when farms were turned into state owned collectives and the famine that resulted is actually much easir to read than a 500 page book on the topic, Frankly that's enough for me, and if I want to know more about it beyond that, Vollmann gives me a list of plenty of other books to check out on the topic as well. I'll leave it to others to go into the strengths and shortcomings of this book. What I wanted to do here is just encourage people who are on the fence about buying this thing to not be discouraged by its length or topic or bewildering talk of Vollmann's "moral calculus." It is in fact a very interesting read, and the fact that you learn a lot at the same time hasn't hurt me a bit.