Peter Beaumont at The Guardian:
What Overton proposes is a sort of grand unified theory of suicide bombing, tracing a thread of bloody utopian thinking through a century or so of self-destructive murder, where the act prefigured either an idea of self-sacrifice for a greater good or reflected the religious conviction that the self continues.
“Such influences,” he writes in his prologue, “inspired the title of this book… It refers to the acceptance of death as the price of a bombing; how a suicide attack is perceived as the best way – even the only way – to defeat the enemy and usher in a new, peaceful age on earth; how a suicide attack is seen to offer the martyr access to paradise in their next life as reward for their actions”.
more here.