A Nation Unmade by War
Published on 13. February 2020
192 pages
978-1-60846-902-4 (ISBN)
Description
"In his searing new book . . . Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power" (Karen J. Greenberg, author of
Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State).
As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second.
"The violence, destruction, and suffering resulting from the imperial arrogance of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts have proceeded on their shocking course while most Americans, Tom Engelhardt writes, were 'only half paying attention.' Regular readers of his incisive, lucid, and brutally informative columns could not fail to pay attention and to be appalled at what was revealed. Their impact is all the more forceful in this collection, which casts a brilliant and horrifying light on a sordid chapter of history, far from closed." -Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects
"No one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt." -John W.Dower, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering
"The mainstream media call it the 'Age of Trump.' Tom Engelhardt knows better: It's the 'Era of America Unhinged.' This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness." -Andrew J.Bacevich, New York Times-bestselling author
"Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire... [an] indispensable book." -Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan
As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second.
"The violence, destruction, and suffering resulting from the imperial arrogance of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts have proceeded on their shocking course while most Americans, Tom Engelhardt writes, were 'only half paying attention.' Regular readers of his incisive, lucid, and brutally informative columns could not fail to pay attention and to be appalled at what was revealed. Their impact is all the more forceful in this collection, which casts a brilliant and horrifying light on a sordid chapter of history, far from closed." -Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects
"No one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt." -John W.Dower, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering
"The mainstream media call it the 'Age of Trump.' Tom Engelhardt knows better: It's the 'Era of America Unhinged.' This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness." -Andrew J.Bacevich, New York Times-bestselling author
"Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire... [an] indispensable book." -Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Tom Engelhardtcreated and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow.He is the author of, United States of Fear, Shadow Government,The American Way of WarandThe United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war,The End of Victory Culture, and a novel,The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected inMission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has writtenTerminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. He also editedThe World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years.TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman'sMausand John Dower'sWar Without Mercyto Eduardo Galeano'sMemory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan's the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will, and a grandchild, Charlie.
Content
- Intro
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: An Empire of Nothing at All?
- One: Where Did the American Century Go?
- Two: Empire of Chaos
- Three: The Election from Hell
- Four: The Making of a Pariah Nation
- Five: A Quagmire Country
- Six: The Honeymoon of the Generals
- Seven: Bombing the Rubble
- Eight: A Nation Unmade by War
- Postscript: Fiddling through the Smoke in 2025
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Index
- Back Cover
