Book Reviews

A Net Genner on the Net Generation . I’ll admit, I didn’t read this book cover to cover. I spent about 3 hours reading it, which probably means that I ‘read’ about half and skimmed the rest. This speaks both to the book’s strengths and its weaknesses. On one hand, the book is clearly organized, with three levels of subtitles within the book making skimming much more efficient. On the other hand as a member of the generation that Tapscott is trying to describe, at least 60% of the information is intuitive to the point of banality. ...

40 Years of Nearly Useless Trivia I will be the first to admit, my interests in this book are not aligned with the intended audience. Despite that fact, I do not see how this book would be of use to anybody not planning on entering a trivia contest about the DIA. After receiving the book, I immediately turned to the sections on Human Intelligence and National Intelligence Support Teams. I found nothing useful. Instead of information on examples of operations, current structure, or relation to the rest of the armed forces and intelligence community, I found information regarding the budgetary constraints of 1994 that lead to a bureaucratic reshuffle. ...

The title pretty well sums it up. Unfortunately the book contains precious little information about the CIA post September 11, which is understandable considering Weiner’s use of declassified sources. This leaves us with little more than a terse history lesson, and Weiner’s tone is consistently ashen. I don’t believe there is a single page when he takes a positive tone on the agency, or any of the main actors. This would be fine if he gave us varying degrees of criticism or alternate paths that could have been taken, but as it stands it feels like a continuous ream of pessimism.

Does exactly what it sets out to. Very ‘Economist/Chicago School’ but if you take that for what it is, you can get a lot out of this book in a very short time.

This book is a collection of essays from Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) and spouses, many of which seem to have already been published in the American Foreign Service Association. (www.asfa.com) The book is roughly organized into the categories in areas like family life, living abroad, working at the State Department etc. Unfortunately this meant that only a small portion of the book contained information that I was really looking for- details about working for the state department. The plurality of the book deals with marriage in the Foreign service. ...

When this book was published, I was in 8th grade and 100mb zip drives were the hottest technology to enter my school. This book was written Facebook was invented, before wikipedia became important, and while ‘wireless internet’ was still a geek fantasy. Upon seeing the publication date, I wondered how much weight this book could hold considering the rapid recent advances. So after reading the wonderfully concise book of 210 pages I was amazed to find that Rheingold had seemed to have taken the best elements from Neuromancer, Friedman, and computing history to make a manifesto for the social implications of internet and mobile technology. Proof of this book’s prescience and relevance exist in the fact that I am publishing this review to an open forum, without monetary gain on multiple online social networks. Proof of this book’s prescience is that YOU are reading this review. All of these things were theories or isolated subcultures when he wrote his book, now they are the reality. ...

State of Denial is not a book about the Iraq war. It is a book about the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. Woodward uses his legendary though diminished access to the presidency to paint a picture of the Whitehouse that was disorganized, divided, and ultimately dysfunctional. Rather than pursue a general thesis condemning the administration, Woodward takes a chronological narrative style focusing on characters and interactions which serves to provide an interesting angle. ...

The most comprehensive and worthwhile backgrounder for the current situation in Iraq that I know of. Very much a contribution to the field.

I thought that this book would be a good piece of airplane reading- interesting anecdotes describing one of the most important phenomona of the world today. I had read and enjoyed From Beirut to Jerusalem, so assumed this would be another good read. I was wrong. First, the book is sadly outdated. This may be obvious, but there are books from 2000 about globalization and technology that still have much bearing on the world today (Like Smart Mobs). ...

Infinitely better than the movie.