Reviews for Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State

The average rating for Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-02 00:00:00 William Lindner After reading War Made Easy, I found this book somewhat disappointing. The autobiographical nature of the first 3/4 of the book is interesting to me as a person with several experiences in common with Solomon. But I did find some of the detail without context, simply a chronology of events. The book encourages thinking and reading in small bits and pieces being divided into some very small segments and few in depth. Solomon ends with this sentence: "If we want a future that sustains life, we'd better create it ourselves." This is in keeping with Solomon's bottom up community organizing experience and belief. His apparent comfort with politics and politicians seems contrary to this belief because politics is so giving a few people extraordinary power. He does not suggest an alternative to representative democracy as we see it in the U.S. He does briefly refer to small affinity groups in anti-nuclear organizing; I wonder if he would subscribe to the Small Is Beautiful point of view. It seems that he would, but he never really comes to terms with local politics where the ratio of representatives to represented is more manageable. I think that I would agree with a lot that Norman Solomon thinks and the way he has lived his life. From the examples of debate dialogue that he includes in the book, he seems very conversant with the facts and details of an issue. But, through no fault of his own, his voice can usually be ignored as a part of such a small progressive movement. He must be a part of the left wing caucus of the Democratic Party. But starting and fighting war is a bipartisan mindset, with the Democrats as guilty as the Republicans. War is as American as Mom and apple pie. Solomon knows that as well as anyone and has spent most of his life trying to change that. After reading Made Love, Got War, it seems he has been tireless in that effort. He has been more successful in getting attention for the minority progressive antiwar view than most of us. He didn't mention war tax resistance in the book, a failing for me, a war tax resister.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-22 00:00:00 Ryan Bell Fifty years of covering the US space programme have given Jay Barbree a wealth of memories to look back on in this book. An entertaining overview that's a lot more gossipy than technical, this was a quick read but didn't really offer me anything in the way of new information. It might be better suited to someone who isn't familiar with the topic and hasn't read a pile of books focussing in far greater detail on one piece of American spaceflight history or another.