Abstract

370 BOOK REVIEWS Theater of war, edited, and with photographs by Meredith Davenport, Bristol, UK, Intellect, 2014, 142 pp., $43.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1783201808 I write this review just as the New York Times runs its first front page editorial since 1920 to call for greater gun regulation after 14 people were killed in the San Bernardino, California massacre and three people were fatally shot in the attack at the Colorado planned parenthood clinic. The debate over gun control has long been one of the most contentious political issues in the United States, with the right to gun ownership enshrined in the US constitution’s second amendment. For five years, Meredith Davenport, an experienced photojournalist, photographed and interviewed men – women are noticeably missing from the community – who play the live-action war game Airsoft, on a backlot in northern Virginia – think paintball but wielding modified combat rifles and semi- automatic pistols. Whatever the controversy and whether we think this spectacle is right or wrong – sometimes I felt like laughing at the player/participants: failed military types and National Guard wannabes; other times, it is deadly serious: unsmiling, I saw contemporary multi-shooters, Davenport suc- ceeds in bringing together photography, journalism