War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*

* (in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times)

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs from TheNew 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, 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 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 reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered in War Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Salon, A Public Space, Believer, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

James Franco's film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.