An examination of how the photography in the  New York Times  seeks to glorify combat. -- SCOTT INDRISEK ,  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. -- DAVID SWANSON,  FOREIGN POLICY JOURNAL Explosive. --BRIAN MILLER,  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 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 Fantastic, engrossing, and gruesome. I love it. --DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN 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 DAVID HARPER 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 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 T. VOLLMANN 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'' book is, woe unto all of us, beautiful, even while it shreds your soul in slo-mo. --ANDREI CODRESCU As Shields himself acknowledges, his reactions to the photos weren''t simple or straightforward. Neither are mine. War Is Beautiful is a great book.

--WHITNEY OTTO  War Is Beautiful is brilliantly destabilizing in the same way Reality Hunger is--startling works, necessary to the progress of culture.  --SARAH MANGUSO David Shields always has the best ideas about what a book is or might be, what its function is, how it might fit into the culture. Almost alone among writers these days he''s an adventurer, putting together volumes that surprise and challenge and threaten us and deliver remarkable insights, intriguing new views of the world. Now he comes with a wonderful book of photographs and quotations--and a truly disrup-tive purpose. He has put together a dangerous and contemplative book that forces us to see behind the curtain at two great American institutions, government and journalism, wrapped in distressing embrace. --FREDERICK BARTHELME Absolutely right, fast, to the point, and  guaranteed to stir things up. --TIM PARKS What bugs me most about the Times is how little we actually see. Nothing real is fit to print, apparently.

I thought I was the only person who felt this way. This book is important. I''m grateful to Shields for doing it. --ROSEMARY MAHONEY I love the theme, the minimalism, the arrangement and selection of quotations (an art form many may not recognize as an art form). This hits me at the level where some of John Berger''s work hits me, which is very rare. A fantastic book. A heart-stopper. --ANDY ROGERS 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 an extraordinary and imaginative endeavor. The notion had occurred to me, as I''m sure it has to many others, that there was indeed a sometimes objectionable aestheticism to The New York Times '' war photographs, but it never would have occurred to me to set out to prove this empirically, or as empirically as is possible in such a subjective undertaking. Shields has done just that. A provocative undertaking. A remarkable achievement. --ROSS McELWEE I love so much about this book--the luscious layout that immediately dissolves into a buzzing cloud of irony, the conceptual exploration of combat semiotics, the shuddering discrepancy between the critique-quotes and the gorgeously rendered nightmare images. --LANCE OLSEN Shields is completely right to call the press out on its endless complicity with power, its unacknowledged distribution of ideology through reportage. A very valuable intervention in, or at least appraisal of, the relentless stream of images unproblematically glamorizing the coalition''s strategies in the Middle East.

A lucid, fascinating investigation of the unholy (or maybe just holy) triangulation of violence, aesthetics, and politics that we get in such an amplified form in war. --TOM McCARTHY A simply extraordinary photo essay. --BRIAN FAWCETT Shields forces us to experience our complicity in creating the mythology of war. In the process, he exposes how violence and pathos are packaged to elicit what we must admit are pleasurable, even inspiring sensations.  --DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF A twisted kind of coffee-table book. --SCOTT TIMBERG, 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.