Aftermath: The Remnants of War - Donovan Webster

In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards; in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones; in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950's, the results of which are only now becoming apparent; in Vietnam, where a nation's effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation; in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life.

Aftermath excavates our century's darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present.

Donovan Webster is a journalist, bestselling author, and filmmaker. A former senior editor at Outside magazine, he has written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. As a co-founder of the Center for International Rehabilitation and an early member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. He lives in Virginia.