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3 books match the query 'Bacevich, Andrew J.'

cover of Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century

Atrocities of the Mind

Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century

Dwight Macdonald

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An essential collection of Dwight Macdonald’s prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America.

What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time—and ours.  
 
In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events—the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality—with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, praises Dorothy Day’s pacifism, and reports circulating an antiwar petition in the White House Rose Garden. And not without effect: his essay “Our Invisible Poor” is said to have spurred the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. 
 
Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald “a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth—a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity.” In our America, reeling from political violence, Macdonald’s truth-telling reminds us how we got here and who we might still become.

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cover of Raritan on War: An Anthology

Raritan on War

An Anthology

Jackson Lears

Rutgers University Press, 2025

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war—the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother's hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan's wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.

Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook
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cover of The Irony of American History

The Irony of American History

Reinhold Niebuhr

University of Chicago Press, 2008

A powerful indictment of American moral complacency from a writer Barack Obama called “one of my favorite philosophers”
 
“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama
 
Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

 “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times

“Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society
 
“Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction
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