Having done the same for nuclear weapons in 1982's Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell sets out to write the definition narrative of the past and potential of nonviolent people power in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (Metropolitan Books). It's an enormous task--analagous to writing the history of warfare. But while any attempt to take a Howard Zinn People's History approach to the history of the world is by definition spotty, Schell's greatest contribution is in also examining where such approaches could lead us.

For Schell--reading in Seattle on May 13 (see calendar), the utility of drawing lessons from non-military solutions to conflict, from the Greeks to (especially) Gandhi and MLK, is in contrasting them with civilization's development of increasingly deadly military strategies--and their inherent drawbacks in the 21st Century. Schell believes Americans have shortchanged the power demonstrated in the nearly bloodless fall of dozens of despotic regimes since 1985 (including the entire Soviet bloc). In the dangers of brute force, he very much has American Empire in mind: "The danger, now as in other times, is that democracy's basic nonviolent principles, so promising for the peace of the world, can be undermined by the very power the system generates, bringing itself as well as its neighbors to ruin."

Schell emerged, with his nuclear book Fate of the Earth, as a global leader of the nuclear abolitionist movement, and he continues to have weapons of mass destruction very much on his mind. His basic critique of the unilateralism of leaders like Bush is that it, and any imperial plan, "tilts against what have so far proved to be the two most powreful forces of the modern age: the spread of scientific knowledge and the resolve of peoples to reject foreign rule and take charge of their own destinies." T*he result, he claims, is that while Bush, in casting about for post-9/11 rationales, has correctly pegged WMDs as a serious problem, only cooperative approaches can solve it: "The days when humanity can hope to save itself from force with force are over."

Schell is after Big Questions and Big Answers here; the result can sometimes be astonishing overgeneralizations. But his concise, lucid prose and his exploration of both the history and potential of nonviolent, cooperative politics are welcome contributions to the far too small collection of books in this genre. People despairing for an alternative to George Bush's militarism will find it invaluable. --Geov Parrish