What if, Pavlic asks without asking, the War on Terror is also a war for America, between America, of America. What if this is the scream of a nation in psychic crisis, a scream that bounces back at itself, increasingly louder. We travel, with Ed on a boat, to Siu, on an island a few miles away from Somalia; an island where Fazul Mohammed, one of the world's most wanted terrorists, once spent a few months. If, here, we have found ourselves in one geographical epicentre of a global war, we find no embers or fevers, no axis, no Weevils-we find a community, where "they bragged about the beautiful donkeys of Siu. Well-fed. Rested. Oiled. They said the donkeys of Lamu are more like flea-bitten dogs than monkeys."

This book is not quite prose, not really a travel book. We move through this space, with photographs, in real boat-rowing, feet-walking time, in poetic and metaphysical space, the words create their own human country, and allow us to inhabit Pavlic's question. The world he makes begs such a question, one of those giant dangerous worlds poets and writers sometimes forget it is our job to make.