A Nation Unmade By War

(Paperback)

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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.

From its founding, the United States has been a nation made by wars. Through incisive analysis and characteristic wit, Engelhardt ponders whether in this century, its citizenry and government will be unmade by them.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The United States of Fear, Shadow Government, and The American Way of War all 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.

Reviews

Unlike the myriad of lesser writers distracted by the latest antics of the man with the orange hair, the brilliant Tom Engelhardt keeps our focus where it should be: on the vast militarized empire whose leaderss belief that they can control the world drains our tax dollars, undermines our children's future, and sends young men and women to die in an unending series of fruitless wars."Adam Hochschild, author ofSpain in Our Hearts

The mainstream mediacall it the Age of Trump. Tom Engelhardt knows better: It's the Era of America Unhinged. This new collectionof essays gives usEngelhardt at his verybest: incisive,impassioned, and funny even, in a time great darkness. Andrew Bacevich, author ofAmerica's War for the Greater Middle East

Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire. In this indispensable book he shines an unrelenting spotlight on the steep cost to everyday Americans of the sunny fantasies about Middle East dominance retailed by generals, politicians and think tank rats inside the Beltway--fairy tales intended to obscure the dark failures of this enterprise. Juan Cole, author ofThe New Arabs

We Americans have learned to sleep through our multiple wars, but Tom Engelhardt relentlessly shakes us awake. For sixteen years now, he has watched in astonishment and written the scene-by-scene review of this imploding empire and he only becomes sharper as old reels rewind and play again. In this volume, the nation wasted at home by its profligate wars abroad picks a big orange emperor, flanked by his very own generals, to lead us on into . . . well, just read the book! Ann Jones, author ofThey Were Soldiers

"SinceSeptember 11, no one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt" John Dower, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofEmbracing Defeat

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

In his searing new book,A Nation Unmade by War,Tom Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power. A devastating critique of the national security state,A Nation Unmadetakes the reader from Nixon and Vietnam to Bush and the Iraq War through post-9/11 America, chronicling the errors, deceptions, and policy decisions which have ushered in a state of permanent war, reducing nations to rubble, wreaking chaos and confusion at home, and threatening the very principles upon which the country was founded. A must read for any student of 21st America. Karen J. Greenberg, author ofRogue Justice: The Making of the Security State

"Since 2007, Ive had the distinct honor of writing for Tom Engelhardt and TomDispatch.com. Tom is a patriot in the best sense of that word: he loves his country, and by that I mean the ideals and freedoms we cherish as Americans. But his love is not blind; rather, his eyes are wide open, his mind is sharp, and his will is unflagging. He calls America to account; he warns us, as Dwight D. Eisenhower did, about the many dangers of an all-powerful national security state; and, as Ike did sixty years ago, he reminds us that only Americans can truly hurt America. I think Ike would have commended his latest book, A Nation Unmade by War. Having read it myself, I highly recommend it to thinking patriots everywhere." W.J. Astore

Author Bio

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, 20012050. 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 SpiegelmansMausand John DowersWar Without Mercyto Eduardo GaleanosMemory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitans 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.