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Edited collections create more than one dilemma. Publishers prefer non-edited books (a commercial matter). Editors lose control of their own authorial ambitions and may need to chase their contributors, who cooperate with variable degrees of efficiency. For reviewers, there is a different challenge. How do they do justice to the complexity of edited collections, without going through a long contents list, which needs to be full and inclusive so as not to offend the omitted? In this case, that challenge is particularly acute because so many of the (32!) chapters for me were stimulating and warranted a proper and lengthy discussion in their own right. My compromise has been to opt to discuss themes in the two volumes and simply offer a view about what this particular reader liked or disliked about the contributions as a job lot.
The title itself was a great idea because from the outset many people would not think of connecting violence and creativity. The sub-titles are also helpful to those picking the books off the shelf. For the first volume is about ‘human violence and creative humanity’ and the second ‘structural violence and creative structures’. There is a moving and illuminative prologue by Estela Welldon about her career working as a foreigner in Britain as a psychodynamic forensic psychiatrist. Also the epilogue by James Gilligan makes a powerful case for interdisciplinary respect and cooperation when rising to the challenge that there, ‘is nothing more important at this stage in our evolutionary history than to learn how to understand the causes and prevention of violence’. At other points in the volumes that imperative is linked quite convincingly to that of our time limited Anthropocene. Although climate change is the understandable concern of the young, nuclear annihilation remains as important as an immediate threat.
Our species is already living on borrowed time (nuclear war has been a constant threat in modern times and ecocide has added to that threat)