What draws our species to war and makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Social critic Ehrenreich plumbs the mystery of the human attraction to violence, taking the reader on a journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the spectacular human sacrifices of precolonial Central America to the carnage and holocaust of 20th century total war. She traces the evolution of war from prehistoric forms of socially-sanctioned violence to the mass religion which nationalism has become and shows the persistence of ancient fears in the most modern rituals and passions of war.