Incoming Stanford freshmen will be reading three books on ethics and war this summer recommended by Scott D. Sagan. Here they are, along with other suggestions from CISAC researchers for summer reading on international affairs, technology, and security.

Jason R. Armagost Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, by Garry Wills

Edward Blandford Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes

Martha Crenshaw In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin

Lynn Eden Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, by Richard J. Evans

Katherine D. Marvel Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty,
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Scott D. Sagan Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne

“Three Books” Freshmen Reading

Selected by Scott Sagan, to "help our students evaluate when war is justified, how to fight justly the wars that do occur, and how best to manage the aftermath of war."

March, by Geraldine Brooks. A novel of the U.S. Civil War

The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama, by Stephen Carter. An analysis of the current wars through the lens of just war theory

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick. A young officer's memoir of Afghanistan and Iraq

As a little girl Susie Linfield was captivated by a book she discovered on her parents' bookshelf entitled The Black Book of Polish Jewry. Published in the early 1940s, it included photos of starving Jews in the ghettos. “I was grieved by them. I was shamed by them. But I was also sort of compelled by them,” says Linfield, the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University. Decades later, she reflected again on the way photographs informed her view of war and atrocities as she examined the photos emerging from the Balkans, Rwanda, and other trouble spots. In her new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press), Linfield returns to this theme. She recently gave a talk at Stanford as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), sponsored in part by the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and she spoke with CISAC about changes in photojournalism, the political context behind warfare, and what she calls “the ethics of seeing.” Excerpts:

CISAC: In your book you look at two different approaches to war photography—that of Robert Capa, the Hungarian war photographer of the 1930s and 1940s, and the modern war photographer James Nachtwey, who has chronicled more recent conflict. How are world events reflected in their photography?

Linfield: One of the observations in my book is that war and its related atrocities are photographed in a much more graphic way than they used to be. The level of atrocity and bodily disfigurement that we are now used to seeing in photographs is something very different than the kind of photojournalism that was done in the 1920s through the 1950s. That connects in some ways to the lessening of political certainty. In other words, the kind of political and ideological factors that used to determine war are much less prevalent in a lot of the wars that are being fought now. If you look at the war in the Congo, it’s just a horrific, horrific situation with millions of people killed. But it’s very hard to understand that war in any sort of traditional political paradigm, certainly not the paradigm of something like the Spanish civil war. There, one could understand the political dynamics and certainly feel solidarity with one side or another. With a lot of the wars we're presented with now, I think that kind of solidarity and political clarity is very, very hard to come by. So I think what we’re presented with visually is the bodily disfigurement, the tortured bodies, but without any kind of political context in which to understand it.

CISAC: How are today’s photos perceived by viewers, as opposed to back in Capa’s time?

L: I think there’s much more resistance to seeing photographs now than there was in Capa’s time. And again I think that’s connected to the lack of political clarity. People aren’t really sure why they’re seeing them or what to think when they do, and I think that has turned into a resentment against photography and against photojournalism in particular—that we’re just being assaulted by these meaningless images. These images aren’t meaningless. But they do take a lot of work to try to understand.

CISAC: How is this tied to ethics?

L: I think there is something I would call the ethics of seeing. To me that’s not an instantaneous thing. It would be very connected to the idea of really trying to delve into the histories that these photographs suggest and really trying to understand them and understand the causes of the violence. And in terms of the ethics of showing, I am much less critical of photojournalists than I think a lot of other critics are, especially with someone like James Nachtwey. He’s accused of being a pornographer, exploiting—his stuff is disgusting, unbearable, unwatchable. And it is disgusting and unbearable in certain ways, but I don’t think he’s a pornographer. And I don’t think he’s a nihilist. I think he’s showing us images that are very, very difficult to look at. And they’re very, very difficult to look at for two reasons. One, the explicitness of them is very, very painful. To see bodies that tormented is extraordinarily painful. And I think they’re also difficult to look at because it’s very hard to have a political context in which to understand these images. In a certain sense we’re sort of left with our troubled emotions, but not really knowing what to do with them.