Dave Elvin has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author. The most-rated is Remote.
War Is Beautiful
Summary
Best-selling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from The New York Times and came to a shocking conclusion: The photo-editing process of the “paper of record”, by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pulls the wool over the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well. This powerful media mouthpiece, the mighty Times, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizes warfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably the Times led the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the listener to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images’ opiatic numbing.
©2015 David Shields (P)2019 David Shields
Remote
Summary
In this truly one-of-a-kind book, the author/narrator - a representative, in extremis, of contemporary American obsession with beauty, celebrity, transmitted image - finds himself suspended, fascinated, in the remoteness of our wall-to-wall mediascape. It is a remoteness that both perplexes and enthralls him. Through dazzling sleight of hand in which the public becomes private and the private becomes public, the entire book - clicking from confession to family-album photograph to family chronicle, to sexual fantasy to pseudo-scholarly footnote, to reportage to personal essay, to stand-up comedy to cultural criticism, to literary criticism to film criticism, to prose-poem to litany, to outtake - becomes both an anatomy of American culture and a searing self-portrait. David Shields reads his own life - reads our life - as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, and heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.
©2003 David Shields (P)2021 David Shields