Reviews
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. The thing is breathtaking, and that Shields's appropriative gestures have enabled it and led up to something so outer-directed, so crucially relevant, is a great argument for their possibilities as a device for inquiry. It casts a beautiful light back on everything that got him to this point. I love it.--Jonathan Lethem A work of perilous ambiguity. No one will go Don Quixote against the Times (aren't we clever?), but Shields has. It's quite an extraordinary task he has set for himself here by squarely taking on NYT war images--the aestheticization of horror. The trouble is that the glamour doesn't go away. The quotes accompanying the pics become, effectively, orphans, because--whatever they say--you can't unsee what you see. Shields is totally on point that the NYT is 1) our newspaper of Glorious Carnage, and 2) the soul of photography itself. Shields's book is, woe unto all of us, beautiful, even while it shreds your soul in slo-mo.--Andrei Codrescu I first consciously apprehend how violence can look beautiful when Apocalypse Now came to the big screen--or, rather, I watched this movie feeling horrified, haunted, and in a dream, until I asked the woman beside me what she thought, and she replied, "It's beautiful ." This would never have come from my mouth before. I had just seen brutality and atrocity; how could I say that that those things were beautiful? But of course, they were, or could be made so. Unlike David Shields, I don't feel called upon to renounce the New York Times for frequently presenting an aestheticized view of our self-defensive follies, imperialist misadventures, and unjust wars. But the images that he has curated and subcategorized until their candy coatings linger uneasily on the palate after we swallowed the rest do raise this question: Whose interest do they serve? When war becomes entertainment and invasion looks fun, who benefits? Shields has done an important thing in making this question so palpable.--William Vollmann 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 is a powerful and important work of visual poetry:its polemical challenge draws the reader, the viewer, the citizen into its sometimes mysterious, often confounding, always disturbing sinuosities.--Lawrence Weschler 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
