{"product_id":"9781576877593","title":"War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*","description":"\u003cp\u003e* (in which the author explains why he no longer reads \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e and came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process of the “paper of record,” by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pulls the wool over 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 mighty \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizes warfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably the \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e led 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 in \u003ci\u003eWar Is Beautiful\u003c\/i\u003e, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"powerHouse Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055441953008,"sku":"9781576877593","price":39.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781576877593_p0.jpg?v=1763793801","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781576877593","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}