Suicide Terrorism, Ami Pedahzur, Cambridge: Polity, 2005, pp. 264.

With the issue of terrorism continuing to dominate media reports, there are renewed calls for a better understanding of the most deadly weapon employed by these organizations: suicide bombing. Ami Pedahzur, in his book Suicide Terrorism, successfully meets this challenge head on. It has long been accepted by those who study this issue that suicide terrorism has been a potent tool both for making grandiose public statements and as a means of engaging militarily superior opponents or difficult targets. Pedahzur outlines various methods, including historical tracing and the analysis of case studies, to further the understanding of this issue as well as the academic debate which surrounds it.