An explosive and timely topic! Leon Whiteson is a bestselling author who co-authored the book A Place Called Waco, published by the Perseus Group in the Fall of 1999. A Terrible Beauty: An Exploration of the Positive Role of Violence in Life, Culture and Society explores various aspects of violence from historical, cultural, literary and personal perspectives. In this book Whiteson argues that what sex was to the nineteenth century, violence is to the 20th century- a fact of existence but banished to a netherworld: For us, violence is a kind of pornography, a vice roundly condemned and slyly enjoyed, a crudely compelling fact of life we seem helpless to confront in any way that makes sense of our thorough;py confused feelings... violence, like sex, is a valid force in its own right, with creative as well as destructive possiblities.