What Preparations for War Has Blefuscu Completed

“The power of cartoons and caricatures shouldn’t exist underestimated,” states writer Victor Navasky in his no-nonsense introduction to At War With State of war
(opens in new tab), Seymour Chwast’s comprehensive illustrated timeline of 5,000 years of war.

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It’southward a supremely plumbing equipment argument for this niggling yellow tome, which uses the power of stripped-dorsum visual narration to demonstrate the abhorrence of killing and complaining flesh’s historical, electric current, and likely future propensity for large-calibration organised killing.

Chwast’s book runs with the subtitle “5,000 years of conquests, invasions, and terrorist attacks, an illustrated timeline,” and that’southward pretty much exactly what it is. The designer has long used his graphics as a tool to promote peace and challenge the ‘necessity’ of war, and this is perhaps his about comprehensive distillation of that yet.

For a rather wee book, a lot is packed in: alongside Chwast’south gorgeously emotive woodcut-like illustrations and the chronological timeline, At War With War presents written passages discussing war (and peace) including 5th century BC Chinese military machine treatise The Art of War
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by Lord’s day Tzu; 1521’s The Complaint of Peace
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by Desiderius Erasmus; and The State
(opens in new tab), an essay on the  link between state and war, by Randolph Bourne.

At War With State of war was initially launched equally a Kickstarter concluding yr, which proved the appetite for a considered visual exploration of state of war and terror (and, of course, another book by Chwast) when it raised well over its target – 784 backers pledged a whopping $112,754 to aid realise the project. The video about the volume that sat on the Kickstarter page is beneath.

“Seymour’s desire was to present his reaction to state of war in its purest form…” writes Steven Heller, who edited the book. “To ready bated his interest in colour and mixed media and utilize what would allow him to focus on the idea alone: marking on paper; just black and white.

“His technique serves the content and the intention – to viscerally connect with the audience and bring front and centre the horror and waste that is state of war.”

In smallish, unassuming paperback course, the volume is a refreshing riposte to weighty, academic, frequently daunting tomes on war. Chwast presents atrocities in poignant, visual, bitesize chunks but makes them no more easily digestible.

Equally At War With War points out, at that place is “no happy catastrophe to this book.”

Buy At State of war With State of war here
(opens in new tab)

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