On Killing - Dirty Harry Wants You!

On Killing: 
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
(1995, 1996) by Dave Grossman

Download the full review from brianranzoni.com!

Go to the short review on Amazon.com!

It's not often that I read a bad book with a good reputation, so it is bittersweet to bite into On Killing. The text teases me with more baloney than a cynical critic can possibly chew--it took me four months to write the review--and yet I am horrified to see that people still eat it up. Obstensibly, On Killing is about its subtitle: "The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society". But Reader Beware! From the front cover in, Grossman plays havoc and unleashes the bats from belfies.

The creepiest claims crawl out of otherwise sedate prose, often cloaked in the authority of scholarship. So I don't blame people if they miss the thesis: post-Sixties media, particularly video games, movies, and television, is programming Americans into homicidal zombies at a scale to rival nuclear holocaust. To get there, the reader first has to navigate 300 pages of heart-rendering tales about soldiers and trauma, liberally dotted with poems and pat assertions. If this sounds like a massive non-sequitur for a central argument, you could be right.

In form, On Killing is a patische of popular 1990's genres: the self-help book, the warrior's code book, the moral panic book, and the attack modern liberalism book. There are so many competing interests, as the author attempts to demonstrate expertise across a range of subjects, that it tends to diffuse the objectives.

The result reads like the effort of a science enthusiast, not a scientist. Unable to settle upon a hypothetical methodology, it veers from the specious to the ludicrous. Most notably the heavy use of conspiracy theories, neologisms, and urban legends. The supporting quotes and case studies have a habit of contradicting Grossman’s own points. Otherwise, they tend to be irrelevant; many chapters and sub-chapters consist entirely of padding. A pattern of long and fallacious set-up, followed by weak punch-lines.

Which is why I’m disappointed that so many adults disagree with me. Reading other reviews on Blogger and Amazon.com, it is apparent that intelligent, educated, experienced elders have appraised this book with all the insight of a potato chip (if you will pardon a return to the food metaphor). I could hardly find any critical reviews at all, positive or negative, not even in a Google search. Indeed, the more lunatic the book gets, the less fans seem to challenge it. As each argument goes on, it becomes more nakedly erroneous or hysterical, until the hot air sends both the book and its readers into flight from reason—the falcon cannot hear the falconer. And if a Yeats reference isn’t enough for you, consider that all those 1930’s dictators were correct--that a big lie, told often enough, becomes truth. The common credulity can also be expressed as a cinematic methaphor--Bug, the stage play and movie where a good-but-broken hearted woman is swept up into the delusions of her schizophrenic boyfriend.

No wonder the wise folks fall for this foolishness. Yet you don’t need me to pump-start your brain. All that is required is to break the hypnosis of rhetoric—from there, you can restore your intellectual will against pseudo-intellectual ills.

"It begins innocently with cartoons..." - page 308.