The Eye Of War

How perceptual technologies have shaped the history of war from the Renaissance to the present From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy. Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering. A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

From the Crimean War and American Civil War through the two World Wars, from Vietnam to the Balkans and Afghanistan, photographers have been drawn to the battlefront. This book selects 200 of the most powerful war photographs, together with poignant testaments by soldiers and battlefield witnesses, to make an unforgettable tableau. Among these arresting images are Mathew Brady's Civil War pictures from Gettysburg; those taken from the Cape to Cairo during the colonial "Scramble for Africa"; those from the armageddon of the First World War; the World War II photos of Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White; and those of Don McCullin and Larry Burrows from Vietnam. The brute strength of military hardware is contrasted with the vulnerability of the human body, as artillery, tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers are set against infantry. Heart-stopping images of the trenches in WWI, the empty steppes of Russia during WWII, and the street fighting in Afghanistan testify to the skill of the photographers.

During the final days of the Japanese occupation of China, Shao-shao celebrates his tenth birthday, observes traditional holidays with his family, and befriends the daughter of a traitor.

The true story of nineteen-year-old Jordana Lebowitz’s time at the trial of Oskar Groening, known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz", a man charged with being complicit in the deaths of more than 300,000 Jews. A granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Jordana was still not prepared for what she would see and hear. Listening to Groening’s testimony and to the Holocaust survivors who came to testify against him, Jordana felt the weight of being witness to history – a history that we need to remember now more than ever.

“You lose your loved ones, and still you want to live.” On 21 July 1942, the Nazis reached the small Polish town of Zolkiew. Life for fifteen-year-old Clara Kramer would never be the same. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, three families found perilous refuge in a hand-dug cellar. Hers was one of them. Living above and protecting them were the Becks. Mrs. Beck had been the families’ maid. Mr. Beck was alcoholic and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life to keep his charges safe. But survival under his protection proved to be anything but predictable. Whether it was his nightly drinking sessions with officers of the SS in the room just above or his torrid affair with one of the hiding women, it seemed that Clara and the others often had as much to fear from Beck as they did from the war. Clara’s mother told her to keep a diary while they lived in the bunker in order to fill her time and “so the world would know what happened to us.” Over sixty years later, Clara Kramer has finally turned those diaries into a compelling and heartbreaking memoir — a story of love and memory and survival.

This collection provides a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective on artistic responses to war from 1914 to the present, analysing a broad selection of the rich, complex body of work which has emerged in response to conflicts since the Great War. Many of the creators examined here embody the human experience of war: first-hand witnesses who developed a unique visual language in direct response to their role as victim, soldier, refugee, resister, prisoner and embedded or official artist. Contributors address specific issues relating to propaganda, wartime femininity and masculinity, women as war artists, trauma, the role of art in soldiery, memory, art as resistance, identity and the memorialisation of war.

A grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War through hundreds of personal photos Marc Waszkiewicz served three tours (1967, 1968, 1969) as an artillery forward observer with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam, where he took thousands of photos capturing the beauty, drudgery, hilarity, and horror of the war. 1,000-Yard Stare collects the best of these in a book that presents an unvarnished grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War. These are amazing, well-shot photos--most of them color, many of them truly arresting--of Marines in the field, in camp, on base, fighting, patrolling, writing, drinking, carrying on. Some have the feeling of candid snapshots while others are more composed (Waszkiewicz was, and is, an amateur photographer), with subjects ranging from a gunner calculating ranges with pencil and protractor and a chaplain conducting a battlefield mass to grunts smoking illicit substances while pretending to fish and images of barbed wire twisting in the jungle and watchtowers at twilight. Also included are photographs from Waszkiewicz’s postwar decades of coming to terms with his experiences, such as a sequence of poignant photos from The Wall in Washington and his trip back to Vietnam. This is a visual memoir of the war.

"On War" by Carl von Clausewitz (translated by J. J. Graham). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.