Product Description

"'The image I have is a kid on a country lane on a Saturday afternoon herding his family cattle, meaning no harm to anybody and putting one step wrong. It's one thing to die in combat, it's one thing to die defending land, but it's another thing to die tending cattle on a Saturday afternoon and we want a world where that doesn't happen.' Michael Ignatieff

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #675599 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 234 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Landmines are universally reviled and yet globally sown; The Devil's Gardens gives an account of the weapon's history aiming to explain how that tragic and paradoxical situation came about.

The authors are the producers and the directors of a tied-in TV docu-series; as such the book is structured with an eye to viewers as much as readers. It starts off with the geopolitical state of play today, then hopscotches back through history. On the way it touches on every base. From Angola to Vietnam, from Pol Pot to Saddam Hussein, from sinisterly sophisticated modern weapons like the "Valmara 69 bounding fragmentation device" to the primitive "earthbusters" of Passchendaele and the Somme, Monin & Gallimore sketch out the ways and places landmines have been used and abused. They also analyse the horrors inflicted, how landmines are designed to cause "traumatic amputation", rather than death, how small and cheap modern mines, so often employed in Third World conflicts, can wreak damage on life and limb decades after the conclusion of the wars that brought them into being.

That said, those seeking a comprehensive and detailed history of the landmine-as-weapon might more profitably read elsewhere. This isn't an in-depth study of military thinking or techniques. It is a book openly devoted to its cause--Landmine Prohibition. As a result the most forceful and authoritative chapters are those devoted to the progress and future of that pacifist campaign; fortunately for the reader they comprise at least half of this punchy, powerful, angry, tendentious volume. --Sean Thomas

Review
A landmines plague raged across the world during the 20th century from the battlefields of the two world wars to its development and proliferation as a weapon of terror. This unique history draws on a wide range of distinguished interviewees and the authors' first-hand experiences in mine-affected countries.

From the Publisher
An original and unique history of one of warfare's most destructive weapons - and of its catastrophic effects in peacetime.