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Buda's Wagon:

A Brief History of the Car Bomb
Front Cover
38 Reviews
Verso, 2007 - History - 228 pages
On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Budaexploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap nearNew York's Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype thecar bomb has evolved into a poor man's air force, a generic weapon ofmass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces itsworldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role ofstate 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 thanthe more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that ischanging cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of powerincreasingly surround themselves with rings of steel against a weaponthat nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

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Review: Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

User Review  - Misha - Goodreads

The book feels like a 2.5-day cruise of all Europe: glitzy and with style but ultimately shallow and unsatisfying. The title is catchy. Davis' prose is lively and pithy. This book however, does not ... Read full review

Review: Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

User Review  - Leonie - Goodreads

'Buda's wagon truly has become the hot rod of the apocalypse'. I now suspect Mike Davis wrote the whole book simply to be able to end it on that snappy quote. It rather does some up the progression of ... Read full review

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Contents

Wall Street 1920
1
Poor Mans Air Force
4
Preliminary Detonations
13
Copyright

21 other sections not shown

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About the author (2007)

Writer, historian, and activist Mike Davis is the author many books, including City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in San Diego.

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