I recently posted a link to the current bestsellers list at Foreign Affairs. One of my reasons for publicizing this resource is my feeling that we have too little background to interpret international news. Too few of us have travelled overseas, let alone lived outside the United States. Our local newspapers tend to be short on foreign news. The television networks and the national newspapers have cut their overseas bureaus to the bone, and beyond. Thus, when there is a crisis in Georgia or Gaza, we don't have enough information to place it in context.
I am reading several books right now on the Middle East, reminding myself of material I have known, finding out about recent developments, and discovering other people's viewpoints on situations. But I was shocked to realize that I had read none of the books on Foreign Affairs' bestseller list for January/February 2008. Here it is, so that some of you may be able to do better.
1. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein. Metropolitan Books, $28.00.
2. World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday, $24.95.
3. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.00.
4. Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations. John Bolton. Threshold Editions, $27.00.
5. Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War. Bob Drogin. Random House, $27.95.
6. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Tim Weiner. Doubleday, $27.95.
7. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Walter Russell Mead. Knopf, $27.95.
8. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. Abraham H. Foxman. Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95.
9. Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall. Amy Chua. Doubleday, $27.95.
10. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. Michael B. Oren. Norton, $35.00.
11. Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. Walker & Company, $28.95.
12. Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century. David Reynolds. Basic Books, $35.00.
13. Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Cullen Murphy. Houghton Mifflin, $24.00.
14. A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor, and Country. Wesley K. Clark. Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95.
15. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Mark Lilla. Knopf, $26.00.
Let me add a couple of notes. While I haven't read the book, I have read Norman Podhoretz' World War IV in the version serialized in Commentary magazine. This is scary stuff. After I learned that Podhoretz was a major foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani, I was really glad that Giuliani crapped out in the Republican primaries. If you think Paul Wolfowitz was a bad neoconservative influence in the Bush administration, imagine Podhoretz in a similar role.
Mearsheimer and Walt's book (#3) aroused a great deal of angst in the Jewish political community. Foxman's book (#8) is one of the responses to Mearsheimer and Walt. Maybe one should read them in tandem. From the use of the term "control" in Foxman's sub-title, I suspect he's using a strawman argument against Mearsheimer and Walt, but, as I haven't read either book, I can't really say.
The ones I think will probably prove most worthwhile:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.
God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.
Those are the three I'm adding to my reading list.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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1 comment:
Hi Glenn ... Happy new year to you too!
Most of my reading recently is pretty light, Perry Mason mysteries, and a bio of Erle Stanley Gardner. It may interest you that Gardner's style of writing was perhaps the model for Jubal Harshaw in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
A recent book find in the public policy area, though, is Richard Koo's "The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan's Great Recession", Wiley, 2008, isbn 974-0470-82387-3, approx $35. The title refers to a 1985 remark of Ben Bernanke that understanding the causes of the Great Depression was the holy grail of macroeconomics.
There is an online lecture 84 min that Koo gave in Oct-2008 at CSIS in Washington - the URL is http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_events/task,view/id,1828/
and the audio is http://media.csis.org/japan/081029_japan_koo.mp3 and the overheads are http://www,csis.org/media/csis/events/081029_japan_ko.pdf
Koo's primary concept is to focus on business manager motivations in time of recession - ie, what pulls on the string, as distinguished from monetary policy pushing on the string. Demand for loans was declining in Japan even though rates were at 1.5-pct on corporate debt. He describes a process of balance sheet repair, as a result of attributed asset values not being real in terms of what one might get if reached for money from those investments.
A shift in business manager motivations. Normally the managerial task is to increase profits via some combination of efficiency, better products, cost control and capital investment, all with prudent use of leverage. In what Koo calls a balance sheet recession, the managerial task shifts to one of repairing the balance sheet, while preserving an illusion that the company is soundly financed.
The public policy implications are similar to Keynes' ideas, ie fiscal stimulus. But Koo's approach in detail is somewhat different - eg, koo focuses on what changes the outlook of managers and households, so he emphasizes stimulus delivery mechanisms that build a feeling of sustainability of financial process. Also, Koo has numerous metrics and charts that give guidelines on applying and retiring stimuli - how much is enough, when.
I think Koo's book is a great how-to manual for working our way out of the present economic crisis.
Cheers!
KR
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