Personal experience in handling cattle

Professor Reviel Netz has written something claiming to be a work of history, entitled Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. I remember reading a long excerpt from it a while back, in a magazine I have since learnt to avoid, called the London Review of Books.

Now Arts & Letters Daily has brought the Professor's barbed wire thesis back to my attention, since the book has finally now been issued, and reviewed in the TLS.

Amazon's synopsis runs:

In this original and controversial book, historian and philosopher Reviel Netz explores the development of a controlling and pain-inducing technology - barbed wire. Surveying its development from 1874 to 1954, Netz describes its use to control cattle during the colonization of the American West and to control people in Nazi concentration camps and the Russian Gulag. Physical control over space was no longer symbolic after 1874. This is a history told from the perspective of its victims.

In his TLS piece (at least the portion of it that is on the web), Edward N. Luttwak does not address the totalitarian uses to which barbed wire was put in the 20th century.

However, he does use his experience of ranching in Bolivia to take the book's early sections apart with ease, pausing only to speculate that its faults of its author might be

readily explained by a brilliantly distinguished academic career that has understandably precluded much personal experience in handling cattle.

Having once struggled through a book by Michel Foucault, I always enjoy a takedown of books in this vein, particularly ones endorsed (as this one has been) by Noam Chomsky. Luttwak's review is a classic of its kind.