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

Contents: 1. Wall Street 1920. 2. Poor Man\'s Air force. 3. Preliminary detonations. 4. Oranges for Jaffa. 5. Our man in Saigon. 6. Festivals de Plastique. 7. Demon seeds. 8. Welcome to Bombsville. 9. "The Black Stuff". 10. Laughing at the dead. 11. Hell\'s Kitchen. 12. The Beirut Hilton. 13. Car-Bomb University. 14. The suicide tigers. 15. Soft targets. 16. Los Coches Bomba. 17. Cities under siege. 18. Form follows fear. 19. Killing Bush, Bombing Oklahoma. 20. Planet Jihad. 21. The King of Iraq. 22. The gates of Hell. Notes. Index.

"On a September day, in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York\'s Wall-Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda\'s Prototype, the car bomb has evolved into a \'poor man\'s air force\', a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City.

In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies--particularly those of United States, Israel, India and Pakistan--in globalising urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyle, as privileged centres of power increasingly surround themselves with \'rings of steel\' against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat."