Tremble the Devil From the start terrorism has been framed as the work of the Devil himself, but this is a dangerous misconception: terrorism is nothing more than the continuation of an ancient war by modern means.
The destruction caused by the international financial system inexorably pancaking as layer after layer of derivative deadweight crashes down threatens to release a specter that has been clawing hungrily at the social fabric of America for generations. Homegrown terrorism, fomented by our desperate economic times, is no longer a distant possibility.
After all, throughout history successful campaigns of political terrorism have always been an indigenous response to social injustice. And as our Western societies and the technologies they depend on have evolved, so too have the methods of the terrorist.
Tremble the Devil uses engaging allusions to everyone and everything from Jesus Christ and Beer Pong to from Malcolm X and Friday the Thirteenth to capture how terrorism has always been with us. It uses hooks taken from the words of artists ranging from the Rolling Stones and Jay-Z, to William Blake and Tupac Shakur to draw you in at the start of each chapter. And it combines the social insights of "The Tipping Point" along with the compelling colloquial style of "Freakonomics" to keep you interested. All of this is woven together to form an intriguing and salient book that reads like a novel.
It is, however, a work of non-fiction that encapsulates four years studying Middle Eastern Government and Arabic at Harvard University, and five years of employment by the Department of Defense, most heavily as a counterterrorism analyst.