In his fascinating new study, Grzegorz Ziółkowski explores acts of self-immolation, a specific variant of suicide protest, and their consequent reverberations in contemporary culture and the arts. Taking a broad global approach, Ziółkowski conducts a comprehensive and detailed performance-based analysis of the practice of auto-cremation persuasively arguing that these acts of political dissent constitute self-sacrifice for super-individual values or a greater cause. Sourcing theatre visionary Antonin Artaud's provocative notion of “cruel theatre,” the study aligns suicide protests by fire to cruelty in the sense of “rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination” (Artaud qtd. in Ziółkowski, p. 15).The volume is partitioned into three sections. The first advances some conceptual framings to the phenomenon of protest self-burning and situates the work within a broader field of sociological, political science, and performance studies discourse on the subject. Section two is a compendium that chronicles instances of self-immolation performed worldwide from 1963 to 2017. This annotated timeline includes the details of each event positioned within their socio-political contexts as well as brief discussions of the repercussions of the act within cultural, political, and—where relevant—aesthetic realms. The third and final part of the book is comprised of six case studies linked in pairs to form three subsections. Drawing on a varied and eclectic set of sources, the author offers a Geertzian thick description of pivotal suicide protest by fire enacted in Vietnam, the US, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Korea, and Tunisia.Ziółkowski posits that protests by fire are “intentional acts of communication that use self-inflicted bodily suffering and the high likelihood of death as their main vehicle for argument” (p. 7). Adopting Dorota Sajewska's term necroperformance, he asserts that protest self-burnings are performances because they are highly orchestrated, non-quotidian acts realized in the public sphere that seek to be transformative and “augment the community's collective consciousness” (p. 7). Ziółkowski further shows how such events deploy the real, spectacular, and symbolic potency of fire along with such dramaturgical devices as banners, pamphlets, and letters to frame and shape their reception. Building on the work of performance studies scholars James Harding, Joseph Shahadi, and Jon McKenzie—among others—as well as political theorist Banu Bargu's theorizations of the weaponization of life as an emergent repertoire of political action, Ziółkowski argues that acts of necroresistance, usually a consequence of the violation of one's dignity, are “radical and voluntary reenactments of the violence of biosovereign power” (p. 10), which enact a reassertion of sovereignty and subjectivity. He further suggests, following Edmund Burke, that the body in aguish is imbued with a certain power “capable of piercing the sphere of the symbolic” (p. 33). Ziółkowski holds that self-incineration is a profoundly creative act and locates its subversive power in the unpredictability and uncontrollability of the event (p. 35).Ziółkowski opens his treatment of case studies with a discussion of the self-immolation of the 66-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức, one of the most well-known and iconic instances of suicide protest by fire. Ðức carried out his meticulously planned action on the morning of June 11, 1963, at a busy intersection in Saigon after months of prayer, meditation, and spiritual preparation. The act was intended as an expression of protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the US-supported South Vietnamese government. The incident garnered global visibility largely through the circulation of emblematic photographs taken by Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne. Ziółkowski's attentive contextualization clearly lays out the ways in which Ðức's intervention emerged from the entrenched postcolonial conditions that overlay vestiges of French colonialism, US imperialism, and the oppressive practices of the Ngô Ðình Diệm regime. The author, furthermore, considers Ðức's action within the larger context of Buddhist religious practice and situates it within a centuries-long unorthodox and apocryphal tradition of self-immolation. While the suicide protest was performed as a gesture of resistance against the oppression and marginalization of Buddhists within Vietnam, Ziółkowski shows how the widespread global dissemination of the images of what became known as “the burning monk” played a decisive role in the development of pacifist movements and the growing public censure of the US military intervention in the region. Here, the examination of political resistance within Vietnam is coupled with an inquiry into the anti-war protests unfolding in the United States. Ziółkowski's discussion centers on Norman Morrison, a Quaker who set himself aflame in front of the Pentagon on November 2, 1965. The act unwittingly took place outside the window of the then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—a staunch proponent of the US involvement in Vietnam—and became a turning point for the reappraisal of the war that eventually led him to step down from his position in February 1968. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company's devised performance US (1966) and the film Tell Me Lies (1967), two interrelated works, which confront the horrors of war and take burning alive—both the military use of napalm in Vietnam and suicide protest by fire—as one of their central themes.The first part of the ensuing chapter attends to a less well-known—though salient—occurrence of self-immolation, one enacted by Ryszard Siwiec on September 8, 1968, at an annual summer harvest festival at the main sports stadium in Warsaw. Siwiec, a graduate of the philosophy department at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, set himself ablaze in front of 100,000 people, including high-ranking officials and Party members to contest Communist indoctrination and the restriction of civil liberties. Despite the immense audience, the incident went mostly unnoticed as the song and dance of the harvest celebration continued while Siwiec burned. The authorities moved swiftly to conceal the episode of which the details did not become known until the release of Maciej Drygas’ 1991 documentary Usłyszcie mój krzyk [Hear my cry], analyzed adroitly by Ziółkowski. This first incidence of politically motivated self-immolation in the Soviet Bloc is followed by the deliberation of a counterpart actualized by twenty-year-old history student Jan Palach on January 16, 1969, in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Acting in the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which effectually crushed the liberalization reforms of the Prague Spring, Palach's protest intended to wake society from its pervasive apathy and debilitating torpor. The event had momentous and far-reaching effects evidenced, for instance, by the renaming of the plaza outside the Department of Philosophy where the young dissident studied from Red Army to Jan Palach Square, or the attendance of tens of thousands of people at his funeral where participants were “gripped by a peculiar exaltation and a sense of solidarity” (p. 204). Here and elsewhere in the study, Ziółkowski examines the efficacy of this borderline form of protest. In this context, the author also examines commemorative practices that shape the resonance and meaning of suicide protests, such as John Hejduk's architectural structures The House of the Suicide and The House of the Mother of the Suicide (1991), the only sculptural works examined at length in the study.In chapter 3, the author turns to the self-burning of Korean laborer and union organizer Chun Tae-il enacted on November 13, 1970, as a form of dissent against the inhuman working conditions of the textile industry concentrated largely in Seoul's Dongdaemun district. The self-sacrifice was widely seen as not only a galvanizing moment in the development of the labor movement, but also as “a pivotal event in the contemporary history of the country in general” (p. 240). Ziółkowski's final site of analysis is the protest self-burning of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, which took place on December 17, 2010, in Sidi Bouzid. Unlike the other scenarios explored in this section, the event appears to have been largely spontaneous, an impetuous reaction to the unmerited confiscation by municipal officers of Bouazizi's merchandise, the only means of survivance for him and his family. Despite the impromptu nature of the incident, its subsequent framing and transmission through a hybrid media network prompted protests across the country, which ultimately forced then president Ben Ali to flee the country and assertedly precipitated the Arab Spring.One of the most extensive treatments of suicide protests by burning, A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations is a rigorously documented, insightful, and cogently argued work that will inspire students and scholars of political activism as well as theatre and performance studies to reconsider borderline acts of protest and performance-in-extremis.