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Title: Why Are We at War? by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0-8129-7111-6 Publisher: Random House Trade Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.41 (22 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Brief yet poignant, and always interesting.
Comment: Why Are We At War? is a collection of Mr. Mailer's musings on the state of the union post-9/11, and it's wonderfully written and intellectually engaging. Whether or not you agree with the "liberal" angle taken in this book (I am much more conservative than Mailer) it is still well worth a read.
If you're looking for hardcore evidence or "proof" regarding the so-called war for oil you should look elsewhere. Most of Mr. Mailer's hard facts are simply borrowed from other prominent, and more exhaustive, sources. However, if you want a great discussion about how Mailer feels, and how many of us feel, in the midst of a war on a faceless enemy, then this monograph will do the trick.
Much of the book is set up as a discussion with Mailer's close friend, and that unique approach allows the reader to enter into the discussion. Although the title poses the question of the day, Mailer's answers are fleeting and inconclusive. Mailer never establishes the "reason" for the current (and ongoing) incursion, but he tackles the issue head-on. Mailer doesn't profess to have all of the answers, and that is the beauty of this book. Turn off the noise, and enter into an honest discussion of an issue that cannot be explained by the pundits, both liberal and conservative, feeding the public pre-packaged "truths." None of us can honestly profess to know the true motivations behind this war, but trying to pin down reasons and motives is a laudable, if not trying, affair. Mailer takes the occasion to guide the reader through this debate with style, insight, and, at times, confusion. He's one of us after all.
Rating: 5
Summary: From the mouths of babes...
Comment: I mean not to trivialize this inciteful book in any way by this title, rather I want to express my surprise and profound admiration for an author far more widely known for his novels than his political commentary for producing a book that has assembled the dispirit facts surrounding America's ridiculous attack on Iraq.
On pages 51,52 and 53 Mailer illuminates clearly the core reason for this attack: he writes that at root, America wants
fundamentaly to turn the clock back-to return America to a morally absolute, Christian society and the current government believes by making America into a new Roman Empire these ideals will come to fruition.
As an old American who spent too long in the beast's belly, I completely agree with Mailer. His eblucidation of America's reasons for its current foreign policy fit perfectly with all I remember from an even more innocent America many years ago-how much more true his insights are now on the footsteps of the new millennium. He writes on page 52, "Once we become a twenty first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture".
There have been mumerous reasons put forward for this terrible Iraqi attack: oil, Israel, vengence, domestic politics but I feel that Mailer's insightful analysis is the best. He readily admits that he believes that the players at the top of Bush's government don't fully realize why they are doing what they're doing-they are unthinkingly pushing a religiously conservative barrel but not fully understanding why.
A hugely thoughtful book-read it and decide for yourself.
Rating: 5
Summary: Still Stormin'
Comment: Norman Mailer has been a very public intellectual since "The Naked and the Dead", the best novel to come out of WWII, was published when he was twenty-five. He has spent a lifetime on the national stage, so there is some validity to the charge that his ego is immense. He also has a lot to say and what he says is worth listening to. "Why Are We at War?", thinner than most Mailer, shows all the Mailerian verbal pyrotechnics and adds to the debate that still rages a year after the United States invaded Iraq.
Mr. Mailer is, beyond anything, an artist. "The Naked and the Dead" may be a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece it is. There have been fictional failures, like "Barbary Shore", and "The Gospel According to the Son", but Mailer's fiction has captured his times and has secured his position in American literature. Mailer is also a gifted essayist and journalist. He is, whether he likes the label or not, one of the original "New Journalists", a writer like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, John Sack (and an endless parade of vaguely talented imitators) who makes himself a part of the story. "The Executioner's Song", about the first execution in the United States after the Supreme Court resurrected capital punishment in the 1970's after its brief legal demise, and "The Armies of the Night", about the anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1967, are as good as that genre gets. "Why Are We at War?" is only a welterweight contender next to that pair of heavyweight champions but the writing is the same. There are also similarities to Mailer's brilliant and unique novel "Why Are We in Vietnam?".
"Malignant and bristling with dots" is how Mailer once described TV. Mailer has been railing for years about the vapidity and soul-stultifying nature of the tube, how it destroys creativity, limits attention spans and inures viewers to all mannner of violence. But Mailer concedes that TV can't sanitize all violence; some televised violence is transcendent. Like Ruby shooting Oswald. Like a handcuffed Viet Cong being hauled into a Saigon street and shot in the head. And like the second plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. An existential moment-Mailer watching the second strike on TV from his house in Provincetown while speaking on the phone to his daughter in Brooklyn; she was watching the same thing live through a plate-glass window. Mailer maintains that 9/11 provided the Bush people-Cheney, Wolfowitz, the whole recycled lot of them-the jingoistic cover they needed to do what they had wanted since the fall of the Soviet Union, namely expand the American Empire. The main reason the conservatives hated Clinton so much was less about the creative placement of cigars than the notion that he was frustrating their dream, their lust, for world takeover.
No words are minced, no punches pulled in "Why Are We at War?". Former infantryman Mailer takes on "flag conservatives" and "promiscuous patriots", warns that President Bush will need a good "...karmic defense attorney" and wonders if we can export democracy the same way we export Big Macs and Coca Cola. Norman Mailer. The One and Only.
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Title: Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal ISBN: 1560255021 Publisher: Nation Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0394536487 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal ISBN: 156025405X Publisher: Nation Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Armies of the Night: History As a Novel/the Novel As History by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0452272793 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0312265050 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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