In Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror Sara Brady provides an exemplary model for how performance scholarship might intervene in the current political and cultural climate. As Brady puts it, the book seeks to ‘chip away at the in-between of politics and performance’ (p. 4). Brady goes about this task with both rigour and style. Deftly weaving quotations, descriptions and analyses of news reports, protests, video games, theatre and many other references from the US media landscape of the first decade of current century, Brady engages the political as performative.

Through many apt examples, Brady makes a strong case for a ‘collapse of politics and theatre’, which ‘can be best identified and analysed by scholars of performance’ (p. xv). While Brady gestures to historical models for her work, the book is less concerned with a broad consideration of politics and performance than it is with a study of the decade following 9/11. This period, according to Brady, is frequently defined by what comedian Steven Colbert has called ‘truthiness’, a concept that describes the appearance of truth or a feeling that something is truthful, rather than a clear-cut difference between truth and falsity (p. 12). The pervasiveness and performance of ‘truthiness’, ironically named by a performer, makes performance studies an exceptionally adept discipline for analysis of politics and media.

The book is divided into five chapters: ‘Bushismo’, ‘Protest Visible and Invisible’, ‘War, the Video Game’, ‘Torture Simulated and Real’ and ‘Obamania’. The second, third and fourth chapters analyse US policy, media and art. The first and last emphasize that the role of the US president can be successfully performed in a variety of ways while pursuing the same policies, or similar ones, abroad. Analyses of George Bush's presidency, the Iraq War, torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons, and Barack Obama's public appearances are supplemented by discussions of cultural performances meant to examine, challenge and reinforce political interventions.

Despite the many strong readings and analyses, however, the book frequently renders performance as a means to political ends, which undercuts the ubiquity of the performative in the political. In a number of key passages, Brady refers to performance as a tool or something to be applied, relied upon or utilized by politicians or media producers as if a pure politics without performance might otherwise be possible. That said, Brady's wide-ranging discussions of anti-war performance, of virtual warfare and military training, and of the Bush and Obama administrations are excellent examples of the kind of politically engaged, comparative scholarship that performance studies can offer.