"The Sorrows of Empire is a disquieting revelation of the effects of current affairs upon American freedom and democracy...Johnson has given us a polemic, but one soundly grounded in an impressive array of facts and data. --Stanley I Kutler, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Every page of The Sorrows of Empire burns with fierce indignation at
the sacrifice of American rights, values, and economic well-being in the name of conquest and empire. Chalmers Johnson has produced a blistering critique of the Bush Administration's militaristic foreign policy and its dangerous infatuation with high-tech weaponry. Everyone who cares about the survival of American democracy should read Johnson's stunning indictment." --Michael T. Klare,
author of Resource Wars
"Chalmers Johnson's relentless logic, authoritative scholarship, and elegantly
biting prose distinguish The Sorrows of Empire, like all his other work. Anyone who reads it will have a much sharper sense of the costs of America's new world-girdling commitments--and I hope it is widely read." --James Fallows, Author of Breaking the News
"Chalmers Johnson is a legendary scholar who gave Americans the first deeply
authentic understanding of modern Japan's unique economic system. In this cri de
couer, he asks us to understand ourselves--to grasp, before it is too late, that
America's modern militarist empire threatens to destroy the democratic republic.
His analysis is powerful and dreadfully persuasive." --William Greider, author
of The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
"For American patriots, there is no more important book to read today than The Sorrows of Empire. Chalmers Johnson reveals the corrupting weight of America's grand architecture of empire, the hundreds of foreign bases and
formidable military capacity, maintained not by the enthusiasm of informed citizens but by the ability of the government to shroud its actions and assets
in secrecy. Like Rome, the United States today is struggling with the consequences of a permanent global military engagement, from which self-dealing
political elites derive great benefits, at the expense and ultimately the survival of America's heretofore resilient republic." --Steven C. Clemons,
Executive Vice President, New America Foundation
"Chalmers Johnson's searing indictment of America's flirtation with an imperial foreign policy should be required reading for all concerned citizens. He describes an array of adverse consequences that add up to nothing less than a
betrayal of America's heritage. One need not agree with all of his arguments to conclude that Sorrows of Empire is an extremely important and disturbing book." --Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President, Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute
"In Blowback, published before 'September 11,' Chalmers Johnson introduced us to a chilling codeword for our times. The Sorrows of Empire is even more sobering, for it associates the United States with a dynamic most
Americans still find unmentionable--our ever-deepening militarism, with all the sorrows of perpetual war and moral as well as political and economic bankruptcy that inevitably accompany this. Here, all of a piece, is a scholar's critique
and a patriot's cry of anguish over the relentless erosion of once-cherished ideals--a dark vision presented with unflinching courage." --John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Johnson's new book is a stunner. He blows away the Defense department's cover
story that our empire of military bases exists to support humanitarian intervention. Along with these bases comes a mania for newer weapons, untested and unneeded . . . Something funny is happening on the way to the American
forum: citizens are discovering they have an empire they never wanted--paid for in casualties, with civil liberties the first victim." --Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, U.S. Army Colonel (retired), author of The Suicide of an Elite: American
Internationalists and Vietnam
