On the one hand, War Made Invisible, Norman Solomon’s latest book, plays right to me. I have always been offended at the blatant racism of American wars. It always infuriated me that the very people America was supposedly defending were called Gooks or Towelheads or Hadjis by American soldiers in th ...more

American Justice: This book shows the official 9/11 US death toll is now 2,996, while a Brown University Study showed more than 364,000 civilians died from US actions in its War on Terror in the first two decades post 9/11. Therefore, the US response to 9/11’s tragic 2,996 deaths in the end mathemat ...more

"What happens at the other end of American weaponry has remained almost entirely a mystery, with only occasional brief glimpses before the curtain falls back into its usual place.
Meanwhile, the results at home fester in shadows. Overall, America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ev ...more

I guessed what most of Solomon would argue - but I was completely awakened to the influence of the media - I'm still processing it. And I didn't know to what degree America contracts out "forces" - those numbers often do not get reported as casualties because the government does not collect that dat ...more

Finally finished this. It was so good, but also so deeply distressing that I needed to take a break and come back. I’ve always prided myself on being aware of current affairs - reading newspapers from around the world, listening to other voices, supporting independent journalists - and even I was su ...more

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher The New Press for this look at America and how the forever war is the new normal for American foreign policy, the complacency or many and how this is effecting our society.

America has always had a problem with the truth, and its own history. This has al ...more

In "War Made Invisible," Norman Solomon sheds light, not only on the brutal facts of viciously antiseptic warfare, but also on the accomplishments and sacrifices of others whose journalistic integrity or ethical courage compelled them to do the unpopular. In one case, he quotes from the handwritten ...more

War Made Invisible is an impassioned plea to readers to recall something we’ve all heard but too often disregard: war is hell. For generations most Americans, including most media outlets, have rallied ‘round the flag whenever the United States government engages in war, celebrating our soldiers and ...more

Norman Solomon, author of "War Made Easy," follows up with this more general survey of early 21st century warfare; how its proponents hide the after-effects of their devastation, out of sight and mind, without ever having to say they're sorry. In this fairly short book, Solomon constructs and decons ...more

Russia : Ukraine :: United States : Afghanistan (and Iraq). This is the point that Solomon makes over and over and over in various forms, looking at varying facets of the same simple refrain. Not a long book at just 240 pages, 28% of which (at least in ARC form) was documentation - which is on the h ...more

Since 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, the US has been constantly at war. Yet, as Norman Solomon points out in War Made Invisible, the government, with the collusion of the mainstream media, has hidden the true human cost of these wars. No dissent was allowed. Any broadcaster who was eve ...more

The post 9/11 wars have cost the US taxpayer at least $7.2 Trillion. Just imagine a world in which that much money had been spent on our infrastructure, our environment, our children, on poverty and homelessness. The American people have no idea how much they pay for war. In the last two decades we ...more

In a searing indictment of the US war machine, author Norman Solomon lays much of the blame for decades of carnage–from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia–at the door of the media: ABC, NBC, CBS, the cable news networks, the New York Times and Washington Post-all stenographers for the Pentagon, ...more

Books on America’s failures in the Middle East tend to focus on either strategic/tactical blunders or the toll on American lives and American morale. One such example (though still an excellent book) is Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. I would position this book as a good counterpart to Fiasco, as it does ...more

I think this an important informative book that is urgently needed at this time. Norman Solomon clearly articulates what I and many others have suspected, and knew in a partially informed way, about the U.S.'s continued war making since World War II. He informs the reader that at this time the U.S. ...more

This work of journalism exposes the extent and true costs of the American war machine. Solomon explores the outsized suffering civilians endured (and will continue to endure) at the hands of the American military, the media and political empires that continue to perpetuate this violence, and the tec ...more

An unsurprising yet still infuriating expose about how the US war machine uses politics and the media to conceal its real human toll and to finance its neverending operations, all in the service of huge profits for the military industrial complex. Should be read by everyone. People should be in the ...more

We're now 20 years removed from the US invasion of Iraq and the start of our ForeverWar, and though it's been a decade since I've left, it seems to me that popular opinion on the war has shifted. War Made Invisible shouldn't be revolutionary in it's topic - namely the real human, moral, and financia ...more