Buda's Wagon

On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York's Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force," a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City.In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies-particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan-in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with "rings of steel" against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

A brilliant antidote to official history, allowing us to understand how the weak have fought back, ingloriously, against the onslaught of the strong., Mike Davis follows the evolution of the car bomb from the Balkans to Palestine, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Lebanon and, of course, Iraq., Davis, long-time chronicler of apocalyptic terror, has done it again: he has made me scared . The brilliance of Davis's story is undeniable., Davis creates a fascinating genealogy that raises chilling questions about the future of terrorism., Brilliantly terse...Davis writes with icily suppressed fury.

Mike Davis is the author of several books including Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.