Why Are We at War?

In the tradition of his bestselling Why Are We in Vietnam?, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer presents a lucid and hard-hitting argument about George W. Bush and his quest for empire. Why Are We at War? brilliantly assesses and scrutinizes the Bush administration’s words and actions leading up to the current crisis, as Mailer masterfully builds his case that Bush is pursuing war not in the name of security or anti-terrorism or human rights, but in an undeclared but fully realized ambition of imperialism.

For more than 50 years, Norman Mailer, through both fiction and nonfiction, has persistently exposed the folly of the powerful and the mighty. Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Mailer has told the truth about war and why men fight. Why Are We at War? is classic Mailer on the subject he knows best: the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the men who send their soldiers there.

Based in part on Mailer’s much discussed essay “Only in America,” which appeared in the March 27, 2003, issue of The New York Review of Books, Why Are We at War? will help thousands of people answer the sobering question: “How did it come to this?”