Genocide, War, and Human Survival

This festschrift for the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton is the sort that gives such volumes a bad name. As the title indicates, the themes linking these 26 essays are very broad; the editors make no effort to synthesize the material or even provide a common definition for terms like "genocide." Some pieces, like the essay by historian George Mosse on the virtue of "manliness" and the Great War, are interesting; others, like the one by Charles Green suggesting that residents of American inner cities suffering from social ills like drug use and crime are victims of genocide, devalue the moral meaning of the term.