Zusatztext 43550765 Informationen zum Autor David Shields Klappentext (in which the author explains why he no longer readsThe New York Times)Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs from TheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe "paper of record,"by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be. Zusammenfassung (in which the author explains why he no longer readsThe New York Times) Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs from TheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe "paper of record,"by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be....

Challenges the indisputable authority of the paper by claiming The Times has sanctified, eroticized and glamorized warfare.
—LENS CULTURE

Shields believes that the images the New York Times chooses set a tone for the rest of the media landscape, and that they can wreak havoc when it comes to an informed populace’s acceptance of the horrors of war.
—HOPES & FEARS

The disturbingly graphic book follows the New York Times' war reporting for more than a decade, exposing the institution's tendency to glamorize armed combat to the point of manipulation.
—THE VILLAGE VOICE

The images that populate War Is Beautiful are undeniably beautiful. Whether or not they're accurate portrayals of war is up to you.
—MOTHER JONES

Propaganda is alive and well and as brazen as ever, as author David Shields exposes in a damning book that points the finger squarely at one of the nation’s most influential media outlets.”
—***WE HEART

David Shields' collage attack on The New York Times *- War Is Beautiful - is, quite simply, required reading*. —HUFFINGTON POST***

Darkly beautiful and incisive.
—THE STRANGER 

An examination of how the photography in the New York Times seeks to glorify combat.
—***MODERN PAINTERS

*War Is Beautiful is the ironic title of a beautiful new book of photographs . . . remarkable . . . powerful . . . There can be no question that Shields has captured a portrait of a day in the life of a war propagandist, and that the photographers, editors, and designers involved have done as much to cause the past 14 years of mass dying, suffering, and horror in the Middle East as has any single New York Times reporter or text editor.
—*FOREIGN POLICY JOURNAL***

Explosive.
—SEATTLE WEEKLY

Shields has crafted a unique visual antiwar polemic exploring the role of the media in shaping contemporary propaganda.
*—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY* 

Staggering.
*—MARK CRISPIN MILLER, NEWS FROM UNDERGROUND

*A twisted kind of coffee-table book.*
**—SALON

***For us to be better “consumers” of the visual diet we are being served, we need to acquire the skills that Shields displays here. For any visual-literacy class, War Is Beautiful could serve as a textbook. ***
—*JORG COLBERG, *CONSCIENTIOUS***

Shattering.
—NOAM CHOMSKY 

A surprisingly cinematic work of journalism—sometimes disturbingly so.
—IRA GLASS

Hugely brave, persuasive, evocative, War Is Beautiful places us inside our skins as the semi-conscious, complicit witnesses we’ve been for these past fourteen years now. Shields’ appropriative gestures have led up to something outer-directed and crucially relevant, making a great argument for their strength as a device for inquiry. The result casts a beautiful light back on everything that got him to this point. An astounding accomplishment.
—JONATHAN LETHEM

• War Is Beautiful is beautiful, brilliant, and very important. The spaces between objects are more important than the objects themselves. It’s hard to make people pay attention to what’s invisible.
  *—MILTON GLASER**

  This stunning rumination on beauty as a hazardous material, this buzzing conversation between word and image, power and global politics, is something that could have come only from the singular brain of David Shields. We are as ever grateful for the risks he takes and for his finely-honed moral imagination.
  —PHILLIP LOPATE

  War Is Beautiful makes an incredibly strong argument, textually and visually. Wildly insightful, it makes me think about these things in ways I hadn’t before. I really can’t in any way imagine it being any better.
  —KENNETH GOLDSMITH
  
  This is an important and revealing re-contextualizing of the war photographs we are exposed to daily in the Times, images we absorb numbly in a glance. But David Shields looks closer. In this book, the ugly needs of our psyches (individual and collective) to make heroic, grand, and meaningful what is most petty, vile, and meaningless—about human nature, and male nature in particular—is laid so bare that we feel and feel outraged and cannot look away.
  —SHEILA HETI

• War Is Beautiful is timely, provocative, and disturbing. I’d previously considered some of the questions the book asks about war and beauty and aesthetics, but seeing these photos taken out of their original context (and perhaps this is their proper context), selected and collaged and framed and sequenced, is revelatory, powerful, and not a little bit beautiful, and all the more distressing for its beauty. This book comes at a crucial time in how we might rethink the role that a photograph can play in how we narrativize and make sense of world events. As a longtime reader of The New York Times, I’m forced by War Is Beautiful to rethink my relationship with the paper, which is more than most books do.
  *—ANDER MONSON**

  An extremely strong work of curatorial wizardry.
  **—RUSSELL DAVI…