War Is Beautiful
The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict
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Narrated by:
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Dave Elvin
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By:
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David Shields
About this listen
Best-selling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from The New York Times 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 Times, 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 Times led the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the listener to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images’ opiatic numbing.
©2015 David Shields (P)2019 David ShieldsListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens and have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis.
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Very amazing and moving story!
- By Jonathan D. Feldman on 09-18-21
By: Leah Garrett
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We Are Soldiers Still
- A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam
- By: Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (USA Ret.), Joseph L. Galloway
- Narrated by: Joseph L. Galloway
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway revisit their relationships with 10 American veterans of the battle, as well as Lt. Gen. Nguyen Hu An, who commanded the North Vietnamese Army troops on the other side, and two of his old company commanders.
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A must listen for lovers of history
- By Borgnimbblefoot on 08-24-08
By: Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (USA Ret.), and others
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Vietnam
- The Australian War
- By: Paul Ham
- Narrated by: Peter Byrne
- Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.
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Fascinating detailed account
- By Alan T Alcock on 04-21-09
By: Paul Ham
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The Brave Ones
- A Memoir of Hope, Pride, and Military Service
- By: Michael J. MacLeod
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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From the trials of basic training on the home front to the ranks of the legendary 82nd Airborne Division to taking fire in the hot zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, MacLeod chronicles the soldier's evolution as only one who's been in those boots can. Candid, wise, and powerful, his memoir takes listeners on an unforgettable journey through war and allows them to witness bravery firsthand.
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A real story of war.
- By Devin Ronk on 03-07-16
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Vietnam
- An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, Peter Noble
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the US in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.
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A more nuanced view than Ken Burns' companion book
- By Vu on 10-21-18
By: Max Hastings
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The Warriors of Anbar
- The Marines Who Crushed Al Qaeda - the Greatest Untold Story of the Iraq War
- By: Ed Darack, James E. Donnellan - foreword
- Narrated by: James Edward Thomas
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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When the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment ("2/3") arrived in the little-known "Haditha Triad" region of western Iraq's Al Anbar Province in September of 2006, the region exploded in a storm of terrorist violence. The most battle-hardened of Al Qaeda had fled to the Triad, and, taking their last, desperate gasps for survival after years of bloody war, lashed out at the battalion with everything they could muster.
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Amazing story.
- By David Moseley on 02-11-20
By: Ed Darack, and others
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Shatter the Nations
- ISIS and the War for the Caliphate
- By: Mike Giglio
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The battle to defeat ISIS was an unremittingly brutal and dystopian struggle, a multi-sided war of gritty local commandos and militias. Mike Giglio takes listeners to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war. At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world.
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Most important book for the coming decade
- By Peter A. on 01-01-20
By: Mike Giglio
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Hue 1968
- A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
- By: Mark Bowden
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 18 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.
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I KNEW This Book Would Sting Me . . . .
- By Rum Runner on 07-28-17
By: Mark Bowden
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Masters of Chaos
- The Secret History of Special Forces
- By: Linda Robinson
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Special Forces soldiers are daring, seasoned troops from America's heartland, selected in a tough competition and trained in an extraordinary range of skills. They know foreign languages and cultures and unconventional warfare better than any US fighters, and while they prefer to stay out of the limelight, veteran war correspondent Linda Robinson gained access to their closed world. She traveled with them on the frontlines, interviewed them at length on their home bases, and studied their doctrine, methods, and history.
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Story of Special Forces
- By Austin Pearson on 02-28-18
By: Linda Robinson
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The Vietnam War
- An Intimate History
- By: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Ken Burns, Brian Corrigan
- Length: 31 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.
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The usual Vietnam info delivered in the old prose
- By Kevin Warren on 10-26-17
By: Geoffrey C. Ward, and others
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You Don't Belong Here
- How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
- By: Elizabeth Becker
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
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Good book for Vietnam buffs
- By Penelopatty on 03-27-21
By: Elizabeth Becker