The potentially powerful corrective offered in this provocative book to the contemporary U.S. political and media definition of “terrorism” calls to mind one of Mark Selden’s editorial efforts from a comparable time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Selden was among a group of young Asian studies specialists who pointedly challenged the then prevailing Cold War premises that were the basis of dominant American perceptions of and official policies toward Asia. Whereas McCarthyite censure had largely silenced criticism of the U.S. government by more senior scholars in the field (lest one appear to be “un-American”), this group argued against an unexamined acceptance of American benevolence as being at the heart of American intervention across Asia since the end of World War II.