Book reviews: Useful Enemies | Sex and Punishment | Rome

Michael Kerrigan reviews the latest book releases

Useful Enemies

by David Keen

(Yale, £25) ****

For David Keen, there’s political method in the maddest conflict. So much so that regimes are glad to prolong them for years – even decades – after, by any credible logic, they should have been won. In Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, in the Congo and Colombia, he finds enemies for whom the waging of war has apparently been more important than the winning. This excuses the trashing of civil liberties; provides a free pass on political reforms; and justifies endless requests for foreign aid. The West is by no means exempt – not just because it’s often sponsored conflict but because it’s waged such wars itself, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sex and Punishment

by Eric Berkowitz

(Westbourne, £17.99) ****

From the Code of Hammurabi to the Wilde Trial, Eric Berkowitz finds any amount of entertaining evidence to support his thesis that sex law has been “as passionate and mercurial as the sex drive itself”. Prudery and prurience have always been close kin, just as there’s been a streak of sexual sadism in the punishments meted out to transgressors, but where does live-and-let-live give way to free-for-all? Berkowitz’s pointis that the law has more often added to the problems than provided answers. Where this gets us isn’t quite clear, though: unless we want to put down rape as over-exuberance or child pornography as freedom of expression, we need sex-laws, however potentially asinine.

Rome

by Greg Woolf

(OUP, £18.99) *****

THE ambition with which the Romans set out not simply to subjugate the world but to subsume it into a greater Roman polity and culture is striking – and it’s what makes the Roman Empire not just important but archetypal. Greg Woolf’s new history will be a boon for the student and general reader alike. Woolf moves at quite a clip – he has to; but always finds room for the telling detail. Most interesting, perhaps, is the sense of how the Empire evolved – staying true to (or subtly reinterpreting) its principles whilst responding to shifting realities.