Mark Danner is one of the world’s best foreign correspondents – in my mind, a peer of Robert Fisk. His reportage combines sharp, formidably well informed analysis and background knowledge with a clear, direct, intensely human way of communicating what he has seen and uncovered to a general readership. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books and a series of books that have gathered together his superlative reportage. The governing metaphor of this book is that violence strips bare the political body and enables us ‘to place the stethoscope against the naked skin and listen to the reality beneath’.

These post-Cold War stories follow Haiti’s election day massacre of 1987 and its aftermath; genocidal conflict in the Balkans; America’s failed attempt to bring its brand of democracy to Iraq; and the post-9/11 ‘black sites’ and torture policies of the American government. ‘The stories come together to tell a larger one, a moral history of America as a world power over the last quarter-century.’

Highly recommended – particularly for its very timely content on Haiti.