Eileen MacDonald

I don't regret reading this book, which is available for free on archive.org. The interviews are quite interesting, and it was a good exercise for me to read about the thoughts and feelings of people I otherwise have every reason to despise. Macdonald is quite fair in her treatment of these women and on more than one occasion contrasted what the interviewee was saying with what one could call the ''voice of reason'' ; the book does not read as if it was written to praise left-wing terrorism. Lastly, Macdonald's musings on these women, their motivations and what caused them to become terrorists are not entirely devoid of interest.

However, the book, by its structure and content, is completely incapable of supporting what seems to be the thesis of the book, that female are somehow more ruthless than men, and mostly unable to answer the main question of the book : what causes women to become terrorists? The question and the thesis could only be answered by a comprehensive statistical analysis, and the book is largely data free. Macdonald juxtaposes ideas without really trying to link them together logically, and the testimony of the counter terrorist guy is speculative and not particularly convincing. It's a little surprising, also, that she could be told so many times that women represent a small portion of these various terrorists groups and then not suggest that the women she chose to interview are as they are in part because they come from a highly-selected sample (and doubly so, because she interviewed only those she could and wanted to) and are certainly not representative of the average woman. Even if the thesis was limited to female terrorists vs their male counterparts, it would be hard to support.… (mere)