A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781933368122)

In the wake of Abu Ghraib, Americans have struggled to understand what happened in the notorious prison and why. In this elegant series of essays, inflected with a radical Catholic philosophy, David Griffith contends that society's shift from language to image has changed the way people think about violence and cruelty, and that a disconnect exists between images and reality. Griffith meditates on images and literature, finding potent insight into what went wrong at the prison in the works of Susan Sontag, Anthony Burgess, and especially Flannery O'Connor, who often explored the gulf between proclamations of faith and the capacity for evil. Accompanying the essays are illustrated facts about torture, lists of torture methods and their long-term effects, and graphics such as the schematics of the "pain pathways" in the human body. Together, the images and essays endow the human being with the complexity images alone deny.

Author: David Griffith
ISBN-10: 1933368128
ISBN-13: 9781933368122
Publisher: Soft Skull
Language: English
Published: 08/01/2006
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.52h x 5.58w x 0.41d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 04/01/2007 pg. 25