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 First, the book is sadly outdated.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). ...
Footnotes to Thucydides A War Like No Other works best as a second pass through the Peloponnesian War. If you haven’t read Thucydides, start there. If you have, this goes one layer deeper without sending you into into Herodotus. It’s less a fresh narrative and more annotations with the context of a few more millennea of human conflict. One marker of the thirty-year struggle between Athens and Sparta is how little either side understood what they were starting. Missed exits accumulated. Short pauses for negotiation gave way to a conflict that grew harsher, less restrained, and harder to stop. So, the Greeks did to one-another what Xerxes could not. ...
Re-org-er Want to see how power al-Sharaa drove in victory to Damascus, or how a CEO reclaims a stalled culture transformation? Skip the nonfiction. Read Pretender! (But certainly don’t read this if you haven’t read the proceeding 7 novels) This is the second leg of Bren Cameron’s long logistics return. Destroyer was apex tech: shuttles, starships, and Skyfall. This one drops to trains, buses, biplanes. 1917. ...
TBW
2nd Sino-American War The US Army has not accepted the simple fact that its performance in the Korean War was lousy. This year I’ve endeavored to understand America at war. After the World Wars, where America was Johnny-come-lately with industrial-might-makes-right, Korea represents the first modern war, where American goals are muddled, local allies are weak, but airpower is dominant. The war in Korea could be the first chapter in a textbook on American military foreign policy about how the combination of paranoia, ignorance, and intolerance of casualties leads to irrational action. ...
** Tidy Narrative ** Few books can make any claim to have stopped nuclear war. But as JFK famously read Tuchman’s Guns of August, his understanding of the real possibilities surround unintentional escalation kept him from heeding to the cacophony of war hawks pushing for all out invasion of Cuba during the missile crisis. Half a century later, is this book still the the premier book to understand this era? I would say, no. ...
Johnson is the villain, Stevenson is the hero, and it’s not a happy ending.
This is Game of Thrones for biographies, glad there are 3 more left.
surprisingly good, game of thrones + mulan + traitor baru thrown into one. Good setting.
Took a bit to get started, but a worthwhile long walk of a book in the end.