Q&A

Writer Ron Fridell's latest book, Terrorism: Political Violence at Home and Abroad (Enslow, 2001), is one of the few basic guides on this topic that is intended for younger readers. Although the original manuscript was completed before September 11, an updated version, including information on the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, is expected to be available this month.

If you had written this book after September 11, would you have done anything differently? I think I would have given more space to the conditions that lead people to become terrorists, especially [the] extreme poverty and [the] extreme, repressive governments; in other words, [the] lack of democracy, [the] lack of a free market economy. I think those are the kinds of things that kids would be really interested in. I think a lot of people don't realize that people living in places like Afghanistan live in a completely different world from the world we live in…. [This] book was supposed to be about [how] terrorists strike at America, at Americans. But now, I think, we're seeing a lot more about why people are doing this and we need to know more about it.

You wrote that the U.S. Department of Defense stated that anthrax was the easiest biochemical weapon to get a hold of. What else did you learn from your research? The fact that anthrax is out there is one more thing that we have to deal with. The good thing about it is, it's not going to kill anybody if we can get this vaccine around. It's not contagious. It's not nearly as terrible a thing, I think, as we think it is. But it's a typical terrorist tactic… that really doesn't kill many people but gets everybody upset and fearful that their government, health organizations, and doctors and nurses can't take care of them.

Do you have any insights into terrorism that librarians should be sharing with children? One of the things that I've thought to tell kids is that… although this terrible thing happened on September 11, this is nothing new. Now, the extent of it is new, but these people have been around for a long time and we have coped with them for a long time. This is not like some new terrible disease that nobody has a cure for…. But one thing that we have to realize now is that we live in the world . There's no escaping it anymore…. I don't see any reason why we won't stop these people. We will.