MADE LOVE, GOT WAR: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State includes accounts of the author's controversial trips to Baghdad and Tehran with Sean Penn as well as televised showdowns with Judith Miller and other pro-war journalists before the invasion of Iraq. Made Love, Got War blends personal reflections with social commentary and firsthand accounts of Solomon's activism and reporting from the late 1960s to present-day Tehran.

In his foreword, Daniel Ellsberg writes that the book "helps us understand where we are now and how we got here." The Pentagon Papers whistleblower concludes: "I was born in 1931, and my generation had to reorient itself to the unprecedented threat of planetary nuclear suicide-murder. Norman Solomon was born twenty years later, and his generation has never lived under any other circumstance. The strands of this book form a unique weave of personal narrative and historical inquiry. Made Love, Got War lays out a half-century of socialized insanity that has brought a succession of aggressive wars under cover of - but at recurrent risk of detonating - a genocidal nuclear arsenal. We need to help each other to awaken from this madness."

Publication of this book in early October 2007 will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. The book is a critical assessment of how media spin and policy priorities have defined and shaped our view of scientific progress and national purpose.

"Science was impartial because its discoveries were verifiable and accurate - but science was also, through funding and government direction, largely held captive," Solomon writes. "Its massively destructive capabilities were often seen as stupendous assets. In the case of ultramodern American armaments, the worse they got the better they got. Whatever could be said about 'the market,' it was skewed by the buyers; the Pentagon's routine spending made the nation's budget for alternative fuels or eco-friendly technologies look like a pittance."

"Norman's eyewitness descriptions of key events are a perfect backdrop to his critique of our country's increasingly militaristic development of the science of death and of the media's failure to question. We should all heed his call to activism, or our children's future could be in doubt."
-- Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey

"Here is a book with a thousand memories for those of us who came of political age while living through urban riots, the Vietnam War, and the Nixon years. Norman Solomon, one of America's most respected progressive voices, gets personal in this account of living through the age of Vietnam, Nixon, tie-dye T-shirts, girlfriends, and even the music that will forever waft through the minds of those of us who were there. Those of us who, like journalist Solomon, will never forget."
-- Phil Donahue

Recalling a landmark speech at MIT in 1969 by a Nobel Laureate, the book recounts: "When biologist George Wald said that 'we are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled - decisions that have been made,' the comment had everything to do with his observation that 'our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.' The curtailing of our own sense of real options is a concentric process, encircling our personal lives and our sense of community, national purpose, and global possibilities; circumscribing the ways that we, and the world around us, might change. Four decades after Wald's anguished speech 'A Generation in Search of a Future,' many of the accepted 'facts of life' are still 'facts of death' - blotting out horizons, stunting imaginations, holding tongues, limiting capacities to nurture or defend life. We are still in search of a future."

Solomon concludes that passivity is not a viable option, and neither is acceptance of the warfare state: "If we want a future that sustains life, we'd better create it ourselves."