The usual trick in writing a book review is to suggest you already know everything worth knowing about the matter under discussion, and then to gauge the author’s performance according to how he measures up to your encyclopedic knowledge of his subject.
Such a pose would be theoretically possible with respect to Ovid Demaris’ Brothers in Blood (Scribner’s, $12.50), since the international terrorism he examines is a topic on which there is a fair amount of public information. But, as a great American once said, it would be wrong. For Demaris has woven together so many strands of data concerning global terror that his study is a thoroughly novel contribution to our sum of knowledge.
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