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by Boomert - Killing: Misadventures in Violence by Jeff Sparrow 12 Jan 2010
The discovery of a severed head in the belongings of a deceased digger led Jeff Sparrow to investigate how killing was accommodated in modern society. In WWI Australian soldiers wrote that ‘roo-shooting’ had helped them to ‘pot’ Turkish soldiers in the trenches. In modern times, both in the production of food and the fighting of wars, society has its killing done at second-hand. But how are those who are directly involved affected by their experiences? Sparrow accompanied a roo-shooter on a shoot and witnessed the industrialised slaughter of a Melbourne abattoir. Familiarisation and repetition seemed to invest the men involved with a detached, unemotional attitude which enabled them to regard killing as merely a job. He also investigated the techniques used by modern armies to turn soldiers into more efficient killing units. Sparrow recounts the desensitised nature of modern warfare and the emotional traumas faced by American troops who killed enemy fighters during combat experience in Iraq. This is an important book with a brutal, very personal commentary which brings the reader face-to-face with those who kill in our name.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Author Biography: Jeff Sparrow
Jeff Sparrow is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the author of Communism: A Love Story (shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award). He is the editor of the Australian literary journal Overland.

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