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It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership – Lessons by Colin Powell

Editor — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:54:54 +0000

It Worked for Me is filled with vivid experiences and lessons learned that have shaped the legendary public service career of the four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. At its heart are Powell’s “Thirteen Rules”—notes he gathered over the years and that now form the basis of his leadership presentations given throughout the world. Powell’s short but sweet rules—among them, “Get mad, then get over it” and “Share credit”—are illustrated by revealing personal stories that introduce and expand upon his principles for effective leadership: conviction, hard work, and, above all, respect for others. In work and in life, Powell writes, “it’s about how we touch and are touched by the people we meet. It’s all about the people.”

A natural storyteller, Powell offers warm and engaging parables with wise advice on succeeding in the workplace and beyond. “Trust your people,” he counsels as he delegates presidential briefing responsibilities to two junior State Department desk officers. “Do your best—someone is watching,” he advises those just starting out, recalling his own teenage summer job mopping floors in a soda-bottling factory.

Powell combines the insights he has gained serving in the top ranks of the military and in four presidential administrations with the lessons he’s learned from his immigrant-family upbringing in the Bronx, his training in the ROTC, and his growth as an Army officer. The result is a powerful portrait of a leader who is reflective, self-effacing, and grateful for the contributions of everyone he works with.

Colin Powell’s It Worked for Me is bound to inspire, move, and surprise readers. Thoughtful and revealing, it is a brilliant and original blueprint for leadership.

About Colin Powell

COLIN POWELL was born in New York City in 1937. He is a retired four-star general in the United States Army and has earned numerous military, civilian, and foreign honors. He has served four presidential administrations in a variety of roles, most recently as Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. He lives in Virginia.

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Editorial Review

The author rose in the military to become “the first black Army officer to have a four-star troop command.” He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Iraq war and served as secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. The release of his first book, My American Journey (2003), fueled a groundswell campaign to nominate him for president in the upcoming election. However, he recognized that he was not cut out for the job despite his proven leadership strengths. He describes how, as he advanced in rank, his military training also prepared him for his role in government. He learned the importance of always focusing on the mission, being resolute in the face of danger and setbacks, not being governed by ego and maintaining a can-do spirit (with the proviso, “I try to be optimistic, but I try not to be stupid”). A good leader, he writes, accepts responsibility for the failure of those in his command, but makes sure to reward them for their successful missions. Unlike the corporate world, the Army recruits from within its ranks, which makes recognizing potential and providing continuing education a primary concern. Powell reviews his profound disagreements with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney on the handling of the war in Iraq, while taking full responsibility for mistakes made on his watch—e.g., his “infamous speech at the U.N. in 2003” claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. – Kirkus Reviews

‘It Worked For Me’: Life Lessons From Colin Powell

NPR Book Review – May 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

If you’re looking for advice on leadership, it’s good to start with a four-star general. Colin Powell’s new memoir, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership, is a collection of lessons learned and anecdotes drawn from his childhood in the Bronx, his military training and career, and his work under four presidential administrations. The memoir also includes Powell’s candid reflections on the most controversial time in his career: the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.

If there’s a theme that runs throughout the book, it’s Powell’s love for the U.S. Army — from his days in ROTC, right through to becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell says that back when he was a lost 17-year-old at City College of New York, ROTC “saved” him and kept him in school.

“I found my place. I found discipline, I found structure, I found people that were like me and I liked, and I fell in love with the Army those first few months in ROTC, and it lasted for the next 40-odd years,” Powell tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “People have asked me, ‘What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into the Army?’ I’d say I’d probably be a bus driver, I don’t know.” [Read the full article...]

The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama by Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson

Editor — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:49:37 +0000

The definitive history of American postwar liberalism, told through the lens of those who brought it to life.

Liberalism stands proudly at the center of American politics and culture. Driven by passion for social justice, tempered by respect for the difficulty of change, liberals have struggled to end economic inequality, racial discrimination, and political repression. Liberals have fueled their cause with the promise of American life and visions of national greatness, seeking to transform the White House; the halls of Congress, the courts, the worlds of entertainment, law, media, and the course of public opinion. Bestselling author, journalist, and historian Eric Alterman, together with historian Kevin Mattson, traces the history of liberal ideals through the lives and struggles of fascinating personalities. The Cause tells the remarkable story of politicians, intellectuals, visionaries, activists, and public personalities battling for the heart and soul of the nation.

The first full-scale treatment of postwar liberalism, The Cause offers an epic saga driven by stories of grand aspirations, principled ambitions, tragic flaws, and the ironies of history of the people who fought for America to live up to the highest ideals of its history.

About Eric Alterman

Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. A columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Best, he is senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute, and the World Policy Institute. The author of eight previous books, including the national bestseller What Liberal Media?, Alterman is the winner of the George Orwell Award, the Jack London Literary Prize, and the Mirror Award for media criticism. A graduate of Cornell, Yale, and Stanford universities, he lives with his family in Manhattan.

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Editorial Review

Before the book was finished, Mattson (Contemporary History/Ohio Univ.;“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country, 2009, etc.) left the partnership with the Nation contributor Alterman (Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama, 2011, etc.), who wrote the final draft. A chronicle of liberalism’s successes and failures, the text travels the labyrinthine road from the New Deal to the rise (and fall) of unionism, the theorists of the 1940s and ’50s (Dean Acheson, George Kennan), the battle against McCarthyism and the failures of Adlai Stevenson, whom Alterman writes helped create the notion of the effete intellectual. The author then charts the rise of the Kennedys, the tragic assassinations of the ’60s, civil rights and Lyndon Johnson, Betty Friedan and the feminist movement, the campaign and electoral failures of Eugene McCarthy, McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. Alterman pauses often to visit relevant cultural history—the emergence of influential journals, Mailer’s writing, DeVoto’s criticism, Elia Kazan’s films, Cheever’s stories, the various liberal contributions of actor Sidney Poitier, novelist William Styron, filmmaker Oliver Stone and—in a long section—rocker Bruce Springsteen. Alterman points out continually how liberals have often been their own worst enemies—failing to stand up to the violence of the far left in the ’60s, fearing being branded “anti-American” in the face of war (Iraq), failing to confront the Tea Party and the ever-more-rightward GOP. Unfortunately, Alterman too often quotes others and only rarely flashes the scimitar wit he displays in the Nation. - Kirkus Reviews

Loving Liberals - ‘The Cause,’ by Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure, finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance, much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.

Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008, this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters, Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism, socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,” written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments, Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”) [Read the full article...]

China Hand: An Autobiography (Haney Foundation Series) by John Paton Davies Jr.

Editor — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:39:31 +0000

At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country—which they did, in 1949. Davies joined the thousands of others who became the victims of a political maelstrom that engulfed the country and deprived the United States of the wisdom and guidance of an entire generation of East Asian diplomats and scholars.

The son of American missionaries, Davies was born in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Educated in the United States, he joined the ranks of the newly formed Foreign Service in the 1930s and returned to China, where he would remain until nearly the end of World War II. During that time he became one of the first Americans to meet and talk with the young revolutionary known as Mao Zedong. He documented the personal excesses and political foibles of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As a political aide to General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the wartime commander of the Allied forces in East and South Asia, he traveled widely in the region, meeting with colonial India’s Nehru and Gandhi to gauge whether their animosity to British rule would translate into support for Japan. Davies ended the war serving in Moscow with George F. Kennan, the architect of America’s policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan found in Davies a lifelong friend and colleague. Neither, however, was immune to the virulent anticommunism of the immediate postwar years.

China Hand is the story of a man who captured with wry and judicious insight the times in which he lived, both as observer and as actor.

About John Paton Davies Jr.

John Paton Davies, Jr. (1908-99) was a Foreign Service officer in the U.S. Department of State from 1931 to 1954. He was also the author of Foreign and Other Affairs and Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another. Todd S. Purdum is national editor of Vanity Fair. Bruce Cumings is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power.

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Editorial Reviews

“An often funny, always insightful account of an adventurous and wonderful life. John Paton Davies was an American hero—judicious, discreet, and reliable—who deserves to be remembered by a book as good as this one.”—Nicholas Thompson, author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War

“From his battles with Senator McCarthy, to his heroic achievements in the Burmese jungle, from his insightful predictions of the Chinese civil war, to his ultimate dismissal from the U.S. Foreign Service, Davies holds nothing back. Loaded in story and analysis, China Hand is a terrific book about a fascinating figure in American history.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Lion

“Davies predicted more accurately than anyone else, prior to the Cold War, what China’s course would be during it. We are most fortunate to have his posthumous autobiography available at last, in which he explains, in shrewd and sparkling prose, how he did this. His book is a major new contribution to World War II and early Cold War history.”—John Lewis Gaddis, author of George F. Kennan: An American Life

“China Hand: An Autobiography” by John Paton Davies Jr.

The Washington Post Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

In November 1954 John Paton Davies Jr., deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Lima, Peru, was fired by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. His dismissal had nothing to do with his service in Peru and everything to do with his standing as one of several “China Hands,” Foreign Service veterans “who were China specialists and had dealt with Chinese Communists.” Davies and the others — they included Edmund Clubb, John Emmerson, John S. Service and John Carter Vincent — were victims of a fierce campaign by the so-called China Lobby, a handmaiden of Joe McCarthy and his allies on the far right, which charged that the China Hands’ attempts to report honestly to the State Department, the White House and Congress about the state of affairs in China had undermined the administration of Chiang Kai-shek and brought about the triumph of Mao Tse-tung and his communists.

The accusations, as Davies dryly summarizes them, “were, in effect, that what we independently reported and predicted was what we willed and plotted to bring about.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, but truth was in short supply in the halcyon days of McCarthyism. The country was “in a national mood of mounting public apprehension, suspicion and anxiety, exacerbated by Chinese agitators, American lobbyists and hostile member[s] of Congress,” and the handful of men who had tried to give their superiors a fair assessment of the situation in China were made the scapegoats for what was portrayed as the “loss” of China. [Read the full article...]

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Editor — Tue, 01 May 2012 10:52:24 +0000

Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America’s two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.

In It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress—and the United States—to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call “asymmetric polarization,” with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.

With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no “silver bullet” reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.

About Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He is a former executive director of the American Political Science Association. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a weekly column for Roll Call, called “Congress Inside Out.” He lives in Washington, D.C. Both are fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Editorial Reviews

Paul A. Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve
“More than anytime in my lifetime, the United States is challenged at home and so is our place in the world. When Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein get together to sound a loud alarm about the way our political system is being torn apart, it’s time to listen—and listen hard. Then the tough part—how do we restore some sense of common purpose, of working together to make our government work? Mann and Ornstein set out ways to rebuild political bridges, beginning right now. We better get to work.”

Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader
“One doesn’t have to agree with every one of Mann and Ornstein’s proposals to appreciate the extraordinary contribution to improving governance that they make in this important book. We could do no better than to use it as a compelling blueprint for urgently needed reform. If every member of Congress would read just one book on the subject, my wish is that it would be this one.”

E. J. Dionne, author of Our Divided Political Heart
“The phrase ‘essential reading’ does not begin to get at the importance of this passionate warning by two of our very best political scientists about our nation’s capacity to govern itself. Mann and Ornstein sweep aside the timid conventional wisdom to inform Americans that our problems are even worse than we think they are. It is absolutely vital that this book’s findings and message enter the consciousness and consciences of journalists, politicians and citizens who care about the future of our republic.”

Extremism In Congress: ‘Even Worse Than It Looks’?

NPR Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics. The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years — and they’re renowned for their carefully nonpartisan positions.

But now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they aren’t hesitating to point a finger at who they think is to blame.

“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they write in their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.

Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, join Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep to talk about the book, which comes out this week.

Mann and Ornstein posit that democracy in America is being endangered by extreme politics. From the first day of the Obama administration, Ornstein says, our constitutional system hasn’t been allowed to work.

“When we did get action, half the political process viewed it as illegitimate, tried to undermine its implementation and moved to repeal it,” Ornstein says. [Read the full article...]

‘It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism’ by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

The Washington Post Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Reading this book is a little like quaffing a double espresso on an empty stomach — it’s a jolt. For this reader it was a welcome jolt. Others will find it less palatable.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have been Washington fixtures for three decades. They are two of the brightest, best informed and most scholarly students of our politics. They started out together as graduate students of political science at the University of Michigan, and decades ago took up residence at the Brookings Institution (Mann) and the American Enterprise Institute (Ornstein). Both have cultivated Democratic and Republican senators and House members to help them figure out the workings of the legislative branch. They acknowledge holding liberal views themselves, but throughout their careers they have tried to uphold a scholarly, non-partisan standard. Republicans once took them as seriously as Democrats did.

Six years ago they published a fine book on the problems of Congress, “The Broken Branch.” Among its many admirers was Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who gave it an enthusiastic “blurb” for the book’s back cover: “The Broken Branch is a serious step toward strengthening the Congress.” [Read the full article...]

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

Editor — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:26:14 +0000

Book Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece.”

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark.
By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the 1960 nomination would go to the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the nomination and Kennedy’s decision to offer Johnson the vice presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy’s efforts to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity between Johnson and Kennedy’s younger brother, portraying one of America’s great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy’s overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a singular understanding of Johnson’s heart and mind, Caro describes what it was like for this mighty politician to find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power is the crucial commodity.

For the first time, in Caro’s breathtakingly vivid narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam.

In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson’s life—and in the life of the nation—The Passage of Power is not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro’s work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman’s verdict that “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

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About Robert A. Caro

Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, an historian and writer. For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.

Editorial Review

This installment covers Johnson’s vice presidency under John F. Kennedy, his ascension to the presidency after the Kennedy assassination and his initial nine months as president. As in the earlier volumes, Caro (Master of the Senate, 2002, etc.) combines a compelling narrative and insightful authorial judgments into a lengthy volume that will thrill those who care about American politics, the foundations of power, or both. Even Johnson acolytes, sometimes critical about portions of the earlier volumes, are less likely to complain about their hero’s portrayal here. While documenting the progression of his subject’s character flaws, Caro admires Johnson’s adroit adaptability. Though he chafed as vice president after giving up the leadership of the U.S. Senate, Johnson seems to have developed a grudging admiration for JFK. However, Johnson and Robert Kennedy could not put aside the animosity that had taken root on Capitol Hill. When Robert became not only his brother’s confidant but also his attorney general, Johnson resented the appointment. Caro documents the feuds between them and vividly relates how the warfare between the two men continued after JFK’s assassination. On a more upbeat track, the author explains how Johnson’s lifelong commitment to helping the dispossessed led to passage of unprecedented civil-rights legislation. The evidence seems strong that JFK could not have engineered passage of much of the civil-rights legislation because he lacked Johnson’s influence over members of Congress. The fifth volume is in the works, and it is expected to cover Johnson’s election to the White House and his full term, with the conduct of the Vietnam War ceaselessly dogging him. The author writes that the next book “will be very different in tone.” – Kirkus Reviews

A Nation’s Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible

The New York Times Book Review – April 29, 2012 (Excerpt)

On Nov. 22, 1963, when he was told that John F. Kennedy was dead, and that he was now president, Lyndon B. Johnson later recalled, “I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe.”

He said he realized that “ready or not, new and immeasurable duties had been thrust upon” him and that he could not allow himself to be overwhelmed by emotion: “It was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership. … The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass. … I had to prove myself.”

At the heart of “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment of Robert A. Caro’s magisterial biography of Johnson, is the story of how he was catapulted to the White House in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, how he steadied and reassured a shell-shocked nation, and how he used his potent political skills and the momentum generated by Kennedy’s death to push through Congress his predecessor’s stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation and to lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary “war on poverty.” [Read the full article...]

Caro’s ‘Passage Of Power’: LBJ’s Political Genius

NPR Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Robert Caro writes obsessively about power. Fittingly, it’s Lyndon Johnson — catapulted suddenly into the presidency “in the crack of a gunshot” — who consumes him.

The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Caro’s massive biography of Lyndon Johnson, is released this week. Caro has dedicated decades to meticulously researching Johnson’s life, and the previous books in the series have been almost universally hailed as a significant achievement in American letters.

Those books told the story of Johnson’s rise to national prominence. In The Passage of Power, Caro takes up Johnson’s dismal years as vice president and his sudden presidency, which he used to shepherd the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress.

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep talks to Caro about the book and his portrayal of the brilliant, sometimes ruthless president. [Read the full article...]

Book review: Robert A. Caro’s ‘The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Robert A. Caro published “Master of the Senate” (2002), the third volume of his voluminous multi-part life of Lyndon B. Johnson, he said he would finish his labors with just one more installment. But clearly he wasn’t being realistic.

“Master of the Senate” concluded in 1958. It left untouched the 1960 campaign, the vice presidential years and the whole of Johnson’s presidency — the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, Vietnam. Moreover, Caro is not exactly partial to verbal economy. His books are famous, or infamous, for running on profusely — not just because of the sheer mass of his research but also because of his overflowing literary style.

Caro strives for the epic. He will make a book, or chapter, or anecdote as long as it has to be to achieve his desired effect — elongating even a single sentence, if necessary, and then stitching it together with a passel of colons, semicolons and dashes, as if scooped by the handful from his handyman’s belt. (No wonder he and his longtime editor are known to fight over punctuation.) Given all this, if the 1957 civil rights bill consumed more than 150 pages of Volume 3, how could the historic 1964 bill weigh in at anything less? [Read the full article...]

End This Depression Now!: An Urgent Message to Stop the Economic Crisis by Paul Krugman

Editor — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:50:00 +0000

A call-to-arms from Nobel Prize–winning economist and best-selling author Paul Krugman.

The Great Recession is more than four years old—and counting. Yet, as Paul Krugman points out in this powerful volley, “Nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge—all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all—remain in a state of intense pain.”

How bad have things gotten? How did we get stuck in what now can only be called a depression? And above all, how do we free ourselves? Krugman pursues these questions with his characteristic lucidity and insight. He has a powerful message for anyone who has suffered over these past four years—a quick, strong recovery is just one step away, if our leaders can find the “intellectual clarity and political will” to end this depression now.

About Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is a best-selling author, columnist, and blogger for the New York Times, and is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University.

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Editorial Review

Despite apparent financial stabilization and indications of improvement, writes the Nobel laureate, the conditions of peoples’ lives have not changed. “You can’t have prosperity without a functioning financial system,” he writes, “but stabilizing the financial system doesn’t necessarily yield prosperity.” The country needs strong leadership to build support for stimulus policies—e.g., large-scale job creation, debt relief and the reversal of current austerities—on a more expansive scale, rather than just accepting compromises. The author takes issue with three main objections: that government spending programs don’t work, that increasing deficits undermine business confidence and that there aren’t enough quality projects in which to invest. Given that the private sector is not investing enough to provide the needed increase in demand, government spending must be a significant part of the solution. Krugman also examines how the economic profession has lost its way over the last 30 years. For him, the current problems were effectively addressed during the 1930s by Keynes and others; the author doesn’t have much patience with opponents or critics, considering them as representing political or ideological, not economic, views. He references ongoing research by a new generation of economists into how government intervention worked to end depressions in the past. – Kirkus Reviews

Paul Krugman’s Prescription For A ‘Depression’

NPR Book Review – April 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

In his new book, End This Depression Now! Paul Krugman states that the U.S. is in the throes of a depression — not merely an economic crisis. The New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate argues that Keynesian economics got us out of a much worse depression in the 1930s, so if we were to follow Keynesian prescriptions now, we could get out of this one too.

Krugman says he uses the term depression to describe today’s economy because “it’s qualitatively similar to the Great Depression.” He tells NPR’s Robert Siegel, “It is a sustained period of really lousy economic performance and an enormous amount of suffering.”

Krugman worries that we’re becoming accustomed to this reality. “We’ve kind of settled into the notion that this is the new normal,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be. And it’s not something we should accept.”

In End This Depression Now! Krugman excuses 1930s policymakers for fumbling their way out of the Great Depression. There simply was no track record of successful policies for pulling out of such an entrenched depression. [Read the full article...]

iGerman: A German’s View on Ronald Reagan

Editor — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:12:42 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is a German citizen who has lived in New England for the past 20+ years, and as soon as Bank of America approves the refinancing of his mortgage, he will be able to afford spending $700 and become an American citizen. See his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Just the other day, I posted a book review on this very website, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship by Richard Aldous. The post also included a Youtube video showing former US President Ronald Reagan as he and his wife Nancy welcomed former English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at their ranch in the mountains high above the Santa Barbara area in California.

Watching the video and listening to Ronald Reagan was yet another reminder of how my view of the American society has changed. Naturally, after living twenty-three years in New England, you gain a great deal more knowledge, and, after all, you are very familiar with the language, which eliminates the need for German dubbing or sub-titles.

I still lived in Germany when Reagan was President, and, like these days, I never liked the dogmatism of his politics, and I still don’t share the view that Reagan’s politics ended the Cold War. Like most Europeans, especially my fellow Germans, I believe that the credit belongs to Mikhail Gorbachov (yes, Gorbachov, not Gorbachev – ask a Russian).

I admit it, I never cared for Ronald Reagan. However, that view has changed. I am still an unapologetic liberal, married to a registered Republican, and my wife, an Irish-American red-head, did, as far as I know, vote for Reagan. I still have my problem with dogmatism, may it come form left or right or anywhere else. I still don’t approve of Reagan’s policies, but I have to admit that I learned to like the person Ronald Reagan.

Every video footage that shows the private person Ronald Reagan also shows a very warm personality combined with a good portion of wit when the situation called for it. Reagan had the stunning ability telling somebody in the nicest tone to go to hell and make that somebody look forward to the trip.

There are many anecdotes that prove my point, but one of my favorite stories is about a group of protesters who came into his office when he was Governor of California, wearing t-shirts and jeans, and some were barefoot. Their spokesman asked, “Governor, it’s impossible for your generation to understand us? You didn’t grow up in a world of instant electronic communications, of cybernetics, of men computing in seconds what once took months, even years, or jet travel, nuclear power, and journeys into space….” When the young man finished, Reagan answered, “You’re absolutely right. Our generation didn’t have those things when we were growing up. We invented them.” (Source: http://across.co.nz/RonaldReaganHumor.html)

And then there is the famous scene from the TV debate with Democratic contender Walter Mondale before the 1984 presidential election where Reagan was asked about his age:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Unfortunately, the fact remains that Reagan suffered from signs of dementia toward the end of his second term, and in 1994, the former president disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease earlier in the year. He died ten years later at the age of 93. He ranks highly in public opinion polls of U.S. Presidents and is credited for generating an ideological renaissance on the American political right.

In hindsight, I would have preferred living here in the US during the eight years with Ronald Reagan as President of the United States rather than the dark years under George W. Bush. I have learned to respect the President of the United States, may it be a Democrat or a Republican. I may not agree with the politics, but it makes it easier when you like the person.

Detroit: An Exploration of a Troubled City by Scott Martelle

Editor — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:32:45 +0000

Detroit was established as a French settlement three-quarters of a century before the founding of this nation. A remote outpost built to protect trapping interests, it grew as agriculture expanded on the new frontier. Its industry took a great leap forward with the completion of the Erie Canal, which opened up the Great Lakes to the East Coast. Surrounded by untapped natural resources, Detroit turned iron from the Mesabi Range into stoves and railcars, and eventually cars by the millions. This vibrant commercial hub attracted businessmen and labor organizers, European immigrants and African Americans from the rural South. At its mid-20th-century heyday, one in six American jobs were connected to the auto industry, its epicenter in Detroit. And then the bottom fell out.

Detroit: A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America’s great cities, and one of the nation’s greatest urban failures. It tells how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse—from 1.8 million residents in 1950 to 714,000 only six decades later—resulted from a confluence of public policies, private industry decisions, and deep, thick seams of racism. And it raises the question: when we look at modern-day Detroit, are we looking at the ghost of America’s industrial past or its future?

About Scott Martelle

Scott Martelle, the author of The Fear Within and Blood Passion, is a veteran journalist and former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News, whose work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Sierramagazine, and other outlets.

Editorial Review

The author shows how “no other American city has been gutted so deeply.” From its peak in 1950, Detroit has lost 60 percent of its population and many of its employment opportunities, a situation caused in part by auto-industry decline, racism and anti-unionism. The industry decentralized across the country before globalizing, and most of Detroit’s population, where it could, left for the suburbs. Now Mayor Dave Bing wants to raze abandoned neighborhoods and seal them off from the rest of the city. Martelle’s case study combines history, economic evaluation and firsthand accounts from individual Detroiters. The city was settled by the French about 75 years before the United States was founded and was a center of diversified industry before it became the heart of the auto economy between 1910 and 1929. It was also a center of industrial unionism during the New Deal and was synonymous with the “arsenal of democracy” in World War II. The city’s death warrant, writes Martelle, was signed when the industry converting back to auto production after the war failed to diversify. Now much of it is returning to meadows and pasture. – Kirkus Reviews

Review: ‘Detroit: A Biography’ by Scott Martelle sees ruin, hope

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

In February 1863, Thomas Faulkner, a Detroit saloon owner of mixed-race background, was arrested on the charge of raping a 9-year-old white girl. Despite his protestations of innocence, Faulkner was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The Civil War-era incident incited a white mob to burn 35 homes, kill at least two black people and injure numerous others.

It’s a chilling story — all the more so because there was no rape. The witnesses recanted, and Faulkner was pardoned “after serving seven years in prison for a crime that never happened,” Scott Martelle writes in “Detroit: A Biography.”

Martelle, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News, caps this account by quoting a disturbing letter from a woman on a farm outside Detroit to her lawyer-husband in the city: “Abstractly considered, the burning of those houses was something to be thankful for.” This, Martelle notes dryly, “was a timeless indicator of the relations between Detroit’s future suburbs and the core of the city.”

The American tragedy of race is a strong undercurrent in Martelle’s readable, if deliberately sketchy, “biography” of what is arguably this country’s most economically aggrieved city. Although Martelle never offers this precise statistic, with a black population of more than 80%, Detroit is also the most heavily African American of this country’s major urban areas. Following decades of white flight to the suburbs, the exodus of the black middle class has further crippled the city’s tax base and chances for recovery. [Read the full article...]

The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis by Ira Shapiro

Editor — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:24:29 +0000

Journalists have called the U.S. Senate an empty chamber; politicians have lamented that the institution is broken—yet the Senate was once capable of greatness. Senators of the 1960s and ’70s overcame southern opposition to civil rights, passed Great Society legislation, and battled the executive branch on Vietnam, Watergate, and its abuses of power. The right’s sweep of the 1980 elections shattered that Senate, leaving a diminished institution in its wake.

Ira Shapiro spent 12 years working for Senators Gaylord Nelson, Abraham Ribicoff, Thomas Eagleton, Robert Byrd, and Jay Rockefeller. The Last Great Senate is his vivid portrait of the statesmen who helped steer America during the crisis years of the late 1970s, transcending partisanship and overcoming procedural roadblocks that have all but strangled the Senate since their departure. The Last Great Senate is necessary reading for all those who wonder how the Senate used to work and what happened to the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ira Shapiro

Ira Shapiro came to Washington in 1975 and spent 12 years working in senior positions in the Senate, playing important roles in accomplishments as diverse as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senate Code of Ethics, and completing the Metrorail system. During the Clinton administration, he served as a leading U.S. trade negotiator, ultimately earning the rank of ambassador. He lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Editorial Review

The class of ’62 (a Democratic majority) presided over the Senate during the two ensuing decades that wrought the great civil-rights legislation, cut off funding for the Vietnam War, propounded environmental-protection laws and oversaw the Watergate hearings, among other epic national battles. Shapiro, now an international trade law lawyer in Washington, concentrates on the tail end of that brave, progressive and fluidly bipartisan run, when Robert Byrd of West Virginia (known as “the grind,” having grown out of his bigoted early conservatism) acceded as majority leader, inheriting the inspired leadership mantle of LBJ and Mike Mansfield before him. By 1977, with the election of Jimmy Carter, the Senate had regained its democratic footing since being unsettled by the “imperial presidency” of Richard Nixon, and was receptive to Carter’s urging for strengthening ethics in government. Despite Carter’s tendency to circumvent legislators’ input altogether, Byrd’s diverse, youngish, dynamic Senate passed the ethics code, met the energy crisis, deregulated airlines, raised the minimum wage, passed the Panama Canal treaties, took on labor law reform, saved New York City and Chrysler from financial collapse, protected Alaska wilderness land and agreed to the peace proposal between the rancorous parties in the Middle East. All of these Herculean efforts required the experience and cajoling of now-legendary senators like Moynihan, Javitz, Kennedy, Ribicoff, Muskie, Church and Mondale. The progressive run would come to a screeching halt with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the decisive turn of the Senate, and populace, to the right. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis,” by Ira Shapiro

The Washington Post Book Review – April 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

The central working theory of American government today is that the system is dysfunctional, ineffectual and increasingly irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Americans. “Broken” has become both a favored description and a general-purpose diagnosis of all the ills that afflict our government and politics. The theory of brokenness is so universal that it shapes and frames every debate about how we choose our leaders, govern ourselves and resolve our differences. The consensus is that we no longer do any of these things well and, in all likelihood, we do them worse than ever.

Ira Shapiro’s new book, “The Last Great Senate,” buys into the dysfunction argument to present us with an extended and lovingly rendered reminder that the U.S. Senate, like the American system of governance itself, was once something great but that its time of greatness has passed.

The book is a tour-de-force meditation on the kind of high-powered policymaking and intricate legislative needlepoint that once seemed to define the Senate’s work. For example, Shapiro describes the contentious 1978 debate over how the United States would officially recognize the People’s Republic of China while keeping its pledge to protect Taiwan. The end of that debate was a triumph for President Jimmy Carter and a badge of honor for the Senate, but Shapiro concludes despairingly: “Of course, it was a different time. This was how the Senate worked in the era when it was still great.” [Read the full article...]

The Angry Buddhist – A Novel About a Congressional Election in Palm Springs by Seth Greenland

Editor — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:47:52 +0000

It is the week before a local election in Palm Springs. Incumbent, Randall Duke, is dodging scandal while courting the Christian vote. His opponent, Mary Swain, a sexy, well-financed newcomer, does not have a firm grip on American history or elemental economics. Meanwhile an anonymous political blogger, “Desert Machiavelli” is exposing new secrets daily.

About Seth Greenland

Seth Greenland is the author of the novels The Bones and Shining City. His first play, Jungle Rot, was the winner of the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award, the American Theater Critics Association Award and anthologized in Best American Plays. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love and one of the original bloggers on theHuffington Post. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the literary journal Black Clock. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Review: ‘The Angry Buddhist’ by Seth Greenland gets a vote

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

Seth Greenland’s “The Angry Buddhist” begins with two sexy American women getting matching tattoos in Puerto Vallarta — and then it swiftly jumps forward into the madcap final week of a congressional race out in the desert around Palm Springs. The incumbent, a wily and infinitely pragmatic political sleazebag named Randall Duke, finds himself facing a new kind of problem, namely, an opponent who might actually defeat him. Her name is Mary Swain, and here she is, observed at a rally by the angry Buddhist of the title, one of Randall’s brothers, the busted cop called Jimmy Ray Duke:

“She glides to the microphone and Jimmy notes the burnished skin, the blinding smile, the five hundred dollars’ worth of blond highlights, fitted red blouse set off against the matching white linen skin and jacket that wraps her like cellophane. Then he envisions her without any of it. Which he knows is the whole idea.”

Mary Swain, a revved-up Sarah Palin, “hell in high heels,” used to be a flight attendant but now she’s rich, courtesy of her husband, Shad Swain (great name!), who “became rich selling sub-prime mortgages to bad loan risks and then bailed out before the con imploded.” [Read the full article...]

Cavorting in Bed and on the Stump Around Election Time in California

The New York Times Book Review – April 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

At the start of Seth Greenland’s comic novel “The Angry Buddhist” two American women get matching tattoos to commemorate their quickie affair in Mexico. Mr. Greenland notes that it will be harder for the married woman to explain why she has a new manga-style kitten on her buttock than it will for her single lover. Really, it’s hard to argue with that.

It’s also hard to explain who these women are, let alone what they were doing together. So Mr. Greenland takes his time setting up a crowded screwball farce about the political campaign that somehow threw them together. When this book was warmly received in France last year, Le Figaro listed “un lesbienne maître chanteuse,” “une adolescente perverse,” lying politicians, stupid hoodlums and “un shérif psychotique et ultra-violent” among the many characters spinning through it. The spirit of Monsieur Elmore Leonard also animates the action.

As “The Angry Buddhist” begins, it’s a week before Election Day in the California desert. The Congressional campaign is red hot in all sorts of ways. The great-looking Mary Swain, running as “hell in high heels,” can work a crowd into “a supine mass of quivering optimism.” She’s a mom who supports the death penalty, a strong military and no taxes. She is also a former stewardess who learned the art of flimflam from the subprime mortgage tycoon she married. [Read the full article...]

Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship by Richard Aldous

Editor — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:02:23 +0000

An iconic friendship, an uneasy alliance—a revisionist account of the couple who ended the Cold War.

For decades historians have perpetuated the myth of a “Churchillian” relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, citing their longtime alliance as an example of the “special” bond between the United States and Britain. But, as Richard Aldous argues in this penetrating dual biography, Reagan and Thatcher clashed repeatedly—over the Falklands war, Grenada, and the SDI and nuclear weapons—while carefully cultivating a harmonious image for the public and the press. With the stakes enormously high, these political titans struggled to work together to confront the greatest threat of their time: the USSR.

Brilliantly reconstructing some of their most dramatic encounters, Aldous draws on recently declassified documents and extensive oral history to dismantle the popular conception of Reagan-Thatcher diplomacy. His startling conclusion—that the weakest link in the Atlantic Alliance of the 1980s was the association between the two principal actors—will mark an important contribution to our understanding of the twentieth century.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Richard Aldous

Richard Aldous, the author of eight books, including The Lion and the Unicorn and Reagan and Thatcher, is the Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature at Bard College. He lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Editorial Reviews

“I can’t speak for President Reagan, but I’ve been both praised and pulverized by Margaret Thatcher and Richard Aldous seems to me to have captured the force of her personality. She did have an emotional understanding of Reagan and her of her that in its essence, in my judgement, was warmer than between Churchill and Roosevelt. But her fury was incandescent over the invasion of Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth, as was the wimpiness of the initial American reaction to the seizure of the Falkland Islands. This is a valuable look behind the looking glass of public-relations politics of the special relationship.” (Harold Evans, author of The American Century)

“Vivid, fast-paced and immensely readable, Richard Aldous’ new book challenges conventional wisdom and prods us to rethink the 1980s.” (Prof. David Reynolds (Cambridge), author of America, Empire of Liberty)

“An important study, based on a wealth of recently-released documents, which puts the Thatcher-Reagan friendship in a wholy new (and more somber) light. It should be essential reading for anyone who cares about the history, the health and the future of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.” (David Cannadine, author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy and Mellon: An American Life)

The Iron Lady and the Gipper - ‘Reagan and Thatcher,’ by Richard Aldous

The New York Times Book Review – April 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1950, a 24-year-old industrial research chemist named Margaret Roberts stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the British general election. “We believe in the democratic way of life,” she told the voters. “If we serve the idea faithfully, with tenacity of purpose, we have nothing to fear from Russian Communism.”

At the time, Ronald Reagan was a modestly successful movie actor serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and a Democrat. After working in television he moved into politics, now a Republican, establishing his national reputation with a speech during the 1964 presidential campaign, much as Barack Obama did with a convention speech 40 years later. He was elected governor of California in 1966, nearly wrested the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, gained it four years later and was elected president.

By the time Reagan reached the White House, Mrs. Thatcher — as Miss Roberts had been since her marriage to an affluent and genial businessman — had achieved an even more dramatic and unlikely triumph. She entered Parliament in 1959, worked her way up the ministerial ladder and showed her steel in 1975 when she challenged and deposed Edward Heath, the woefully unsuccessful Tory leader.

She then won the general election in May 1979, and was installed at Downing Street as prime minister, ready to greet the new president when he was inaugurated in 1981. Reagan was re-elected and spent eight years in the White House; Thatcher won two more elections and was prime minister for more than 11 years. Together they dominated the 1980s. It is a remarkable story, which deserves the fresh account that Richard Aldous, a professor of history at Bard College, gives it in “Reagan and Thatcher.” His book casts new light on the heroic version in which two great leaders continued the struggle for freedom waged for generations past by “the English-speaking peoples.” [Read the full article...]

Truth Like the Sun – A Novel About a Master Politician and an Investigative Reporter by Jim Lynch

Editor — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:08:05 +0000

A classic and hugely entertaining political novel, the cat-and-mouse story of urban intrigue in Seattle both in 1962, when Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, and in 2001, after its transformation in the Microsoft gold rush.

Larger than life, Roger Morgan was the mastermind behind the fair that made the city famous and is still a backstage power forty years later, when at the age of seventy he runs for mayor in hopes of restoring all of Seattle’s former glory. Helen Gulanos, a reporter every bit as eager to make her mark, sees her assignment to investigate the events of 1962 become front-page news with Morgan’s candidacy, and resolves to find out who he really is and where his power comes from: in 1962, a brash and excitable young promoter, greeting everyone from Elvis Presley to Lyndon Johnson, smooth-talking himself out of difficult situations, dipping in and out of secret card games; now, a beloved public figure with, it turns out, still-plentiful secrets. Wonderfully interwoven into this tale of the city of dreams are backroom deals, idealism and pragmatism, the best and worst ambitions, and all the aspirations that shape our communities and our lives.

About Jim Lynch

JIM LYNCH has received the H. L. Mencken Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists, among other national honors. His most recent novel, Border Songs, won the Washington State Book Award and is currently being adapted for television.

Editorial Review

Master politician Roger Morgan moves from crafting the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair to running for mayor of the city 40 years later, but along the way a nosey newspaper reporter investigates his checkered past.

Lynch moves the narrative along by alternating chapters focused on the young Morgan’s brash ambition in putting obscure Seattle on the world map in 1962 and his decision to oust the sitting mayor in 2001. Hired by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to produce a feature focused on the 40th anniversary of the Fair—and of its iconic structure, the Space Needle—reporter Helen Gulanos starts to dig into Morgan’s past. At first everything seems to check out. He was a young Turk determined to make a difference in Seattle’s place in cultural history, and while in the ’60s he was never in an elected office, he still emerged as a consummate politician, never forgetting names, dates or special occasions. (In one particularly telling scene he goes to talk to beggars on the Seattle streets to find out why they’d decided to move from Spokane—and he offers money to the one with the best story to tell.) But as Helen doggedly pursues the story, sordid details begin to emerge—the rumor that cops had been on the take, for example, and had used their graft money to invest in apartment buildings for which they’d received inside information from Morgan. And Helen starts to probe even darker secrets—that before a trial on this scandal a star witness had been murdered. It also turns out that Helen is no rose herself, for she’s twice been accused of libel at her previous newspaper. – Kirkus Reviews

Seattle Reporter Finds Bubbles of Corruption Under the Space Needle

The New York Times Book Review – April 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

There they are, thick on the ground in Jim Lynch’s “Truth Like the Sun”: setups for familiar plot twists that allow a novel to trudge forward on autopilot, delivering nothing of value to either reader or author. Mr. Lynch’s book, very good to begin with, is all the better for not exploiting such cheap tricks.

He tells a story with two main characters from vastly different worlds. Hack tradition dictates that these two ought to fall in love, discover a secret that links them inextricably, join forces to solve an age-old riddle or otherwise sleepwalk through story threads that eventually intertwine.

But Mr. Lynch’s twosome, a 30-ish newspaper reporter and the much older bon vivant and “silver-tongued P. R. Hercules,” who is known unofficially as “Mr. Seattle,” are not dumbed down. They don’t do any of the obvious things. And they are such fine creations that they can’t be reduced to thumbnail descriptions.

Mr. Lynch’s Helen Gulanos and Roger Morgan are glamorously smart throwbacks to character-driven independent films like “The Parallax View” (also set in Seattle) and reportage-driven fiction like Tom Wolfe’s“Bonfire of the Vanities.” They ought to be natural enemies, this tenacious newspaperwoman and Seattle’s best-oiled political fixer, but each half-secretly likes the other’s style. The ways in which they connect, via tales of corruption bubbling beneath Seattle’s boomtown prosperity, give “Truth Like the Sun” a whiff of that other unclassifiable classic, the movie “Chinatown.” [Read the full article...]

Book World: Jim Lynch’s ‘Truth Like the Sun’ is a bittersweet love note to Seattle

The Washington Post Book Review – April 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

Seattle, that metronatural paradise of fine coffee and clear WiFi, gets a bittersweet love note in this new novel by Jim Lynch. “Truth Like the Sun” illuminates the city’s commingled beauty and vanity with a story of civic pride, political intrigue and journalistic tenacity. That’s a lot for a mere 250 pages to do — Tom Wolfe’s sendup of Atlanta, “A Man in Full,” thundered along for three times that many pages. But perhaps such briskness is appropriate for the trim progressives of America’s most active city.

Knitting together fact and fiction, history and current events, Lynch captures the modern spirit of the Emerald City in the outsize presence of one remarkable character, Roger Morgan, a charmer known affectionately as “Mr. Seattle.” We meet him atop the Space Needle in 1962 on the opening day of the World’s Fair. With a past as cloudy as Seattle’s weather, Roger is the city’s “grand exalted dreamer,” the impossibly young father of the fair, the man who first drew the Space Needle on a cocktail napkin and then saw it rise in 407 days. Everything about him calls for exclamation points! He’s “the city’s good luck charm.” Hundreds of bells clang, thousands of balloons float to the sky, 35 countries join the extravaganza, and throngs of people begin arriving to behold “the world of tomorrow today!” [Read the full article...]

Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan by Ahmed Rashid

Editor — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:57:46 +0000

The leading journalist on Pakistan lays out America’s options with Pakistan and Afghanistan in the post-Bin Laden years.

What are the possibilities-and hazards-facing America as it withdraws from Afghanistan and as it reviews its long engagement in Pakistan? Where is the Taliban now in both these countries? What does the immediate future hold and what are America’s choices as President Obama considers our complicated history and faces reelection?

These are some of the crucial questions that Ahmed Rashid- Pakistan’s preeminent journalist-takes on in this follow-up to his acclaimed Descent into Chaos. Rashid correctly predicted that the Iraq war would have to be refocused into Afghanistan and that Pakistan would emerge as the leading player through which American interests and actions would have to be directed. Now, as Washington and the rest of the West wrestle with negotiating with unreliable and unstable “allies” in Pakistan, there is no better guide to the dark future than Ahmed Rashid.

He focuses on the long-term problems-the changing casts of characters, the future of international terrorism, and the actual policies and strategies both within Pakistan and Afghanistan and among the Western allies-as the world tries to bring some stability to a fractured region saddled with a legacy of violence and corruption. The decisions made by America and the West will affect the security and safety of the world. And as he has done so well in the past, Rashid offers sensible solutions and provides a way forward for all three countries.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid is a journalist who has been covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia for more than twenty years. He is a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, Daily Telegraph, and The Nation, a leading newspaper in Pakistan. His #1 New York Times bestseller Taliban has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Editorial Review

Not yet a failed state like Somalia, Pakistan is inching perilously close. The irresponsible elite class pays little taxes to an incompetent government whose citizens, long among Asia’s most impoverished, are growing poorer. The army rules; civilian leaders defer to the military, handing over a lion’s share of the budget which it devotes to high-tech arms, including a nuclear arsenal, directed at India. Hatred of India is a national obsession. Preparations for the inevitable war require a compliant Afghanistan on its opposite border, so Pakistan has always supported the Taliban, whose fanatic Islam seems more anti-India than the traditional, easygoing Afghan version. No fan of international terrorism, Pakistan happily accepted the avalanche of American money that followed 9/11 and provided valuable aid in tracking down al-Qaeda militants even within its borders. Although no secret, its continued support of the Taliban seemed a mystery to the Bush administration for years, and Pakistan remains impervious to American hectoring and threats to cut off aid. President Obama took office promising to fix matters, but he has proved a disappointment. Supporting the Taliban has brought Pakistan few benefits. Perhaps most disturbingly, a separate Taliban faction has started to unleash a vicious, destabilizing terrorist campaign. – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘Pakistan on the Brink’ by Ahmed Rashid

The Washington Post Book Review – April 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Five years ago, on a trip to South Asia, I asked a former Pakistani ambassador where Osama bin Laden was hiding. The ambassador replied that he would be found in a safe house built by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, near a military headquarters. I was taken aback, but the ambassador expressed complete confidence in this speculation. Clearly, Pakistanis understood their complex relationships with terror and with Washington; Americans took years to catch up.

Ahmed Rashid, one of Pakistan’s premier journalists and analysts, knows the region’s pressures better than most. He literally wrote the book on the Taliban and now has added a superb work on the future of Pakistan, a country many people deem the world’s most dangerous.“Pakistan on the Brink” depicts a nation with a severe socioeconomic crisis, and with political leadership that has neither the courage nor the will to carry out essential reforms and is building the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal on the globe. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is in a state of virtual meltdown, Rashid rightly contends, with both sides to blame. [Read the full article...]

Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent by Edward Luce

Editor — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:27:26 +0000

“Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.”-Sir Ernest Rutherford, winner of the Nobel Prize in Nuclear Physics

Time to Start Thinking is a book destined to spark debate among liberals and conservatives alike. Drawing on his decades of exceptional journalism and his connections within Washington and around the world, Luce advances a carefully constructed and controversial argument, backed up by interviews with many of the key players in politics and business, that America is losing its pragmatism – and that the consequences of this may soon leave the country high and dry.

Luce turns his attention to a number of different key issues that are set to affect America’s position in the world order: the changing structure of the US economy, the continued polarization of American politics; the debilitating effect of the “permanent election campaign”; the challenges involved in the overhaul of the country’s public education system; and the health-or sickliness-of American innovation in technology and business. His conclusion, “An Exceptional Challenge” looks at America’s dwindling options in a world where the pace is increasingly being set elsewhere. While many Americans believe that their country can and should retain its status as a global superpower, Luce sees this as an increasingly unlikely scenario, unless Americans themselves can stand up against the country’s increasingly plutocratic character. America has bounced back successfully from the shocks of The Great Depression and the Soviet launch of Sputnik, but Luce wonders if the next crisis in American confidence may knock it off the top-dog position for good.

As distressing as it is important, Time to Start Thinking presents an America in economic, social, and political crisis, in danger of losing its most defining and vital characteristic: its pragmatism.

About Edward Luce

Edward Luce was a speech writer for the Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers and now works as the chief U.S. columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of the national best seller In Spite of the Gods, and lives in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

“In a tradition stretching back to de Tocqueville, sympathetic foreigners are often the keenest observers of American life. Edward Luce is one such person. He paints a highly disturbing picture of the state of American society, and of the total failure of American elites to come to grips with the real problems facing the country. It rises far above the current political rhetoric by its measured reliance on facts rather than canned ideological posturing to reach its conclusions.”—Francis Fukuyama, author of The End Of History and The Last Man

“Time to Start Thinking is not only a wonderful tapestry of the current state of America, it provides a deeply insightful narrative on the origins of our current economic and political malaise. Ed Luce is a brilliant reporter who has spoken to everyone: CEOs and members of the cabinet, lobbyists and small town mayors, recent MBAs and unemployed teachers. In his acutely observed, often witty, and very humane portraits he succeeds in converting the abstractions of economics and bringing them to life. This is a book that will transform the way you think about this country.”—Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Lords of Finance

“Americans need friends who will tell us what we need to hear and how to think about the troubles, many of our own making, that threaten our democracy, prosperity, and leadership in the world. We’ve got just such a friend in Ed Luce. He’s a foreign observer who has not just traveled widely in the United States but listened carefully to a wide array of our citizens. His concerns reflect what he has seen and heard from us, and he shares with his predecessor de Tocqueville a belief that America’s greatness lies in an ‘ability to repair her faults.’ ”—Strobe Talbott, president, The Brookings Institution

The Big Bang - ‘Time to Start Thinking,’ by Edward Luce

The New York Times Book Review – April 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1990, Japan was at the peak of its prosperity. It seemed an unstoppable force. But the boom turned out to be a bubble. Remember MITI, Japan’s economic planning agency? It’s now defunct, but then it was the envy of “competitiveness” gurus the world over. MITI, plus public-private cooperation, plus thrifty citizens and dedicated workers, plus demanding schools and diligent students, plus a sheltered domestic economy, plus ferociously competitive exporters — all worked together to create a new variety of capitalism, one destined to eat America’s lunch. Or so it seemed.

If you stepped into any bookstore in Tokyo, however, you saw stacks, veritable towers, of a discordant book. “The Sun Also Sets,” by Bill Emmott, sold spectacularly in Japan. The Japanese felt that something was amiss; they (and Emmott, later the editor of The Economist) were right.

So now, two Japanese lost decades later, a generation has passed. Again Americans are worried about decline; again we fear that an Asian economic superpower — now China, of course, not Japan — will eat our lunch. For those old enough to have lived through the competitiveness debate of 20 years ago, Edward Luce’s new book, “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent,” will seem awfully familiar. [Read the full article...]

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Editor — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:04:14 +0000

By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America – and much of the West – into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:

1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?
2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America’s central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America’s major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?

America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States of America
“Brzezinski’s latest book reflects his talent for unraveling complex historical issues and his strength in advocating long-term solutions for them.”

Senator John Kerry“Strategic Vision is a clear, vivid look at America’s place in the world today. Rather than surrender to defeatist speculation about the perceived end to the American Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s reality-based insights explore how the United States can move forward over the next two decades. This is a must-read for a straightforward assessment of the challenges of today and tomorrow and the unique strengths America brings to the global stage.”

Senator Richard G. Lugar, State of Indiana; Ranking Member of and Former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“Informed by a lifetime of comprehensive scholarship and many years of responsibility on the front lines of our diplomacy and national security, Zbigniew Brzezinski provides in Strategic Vision a comprehensive blueprint for successful planning and action. His challenge to the U.S. to be a sophisticated leader of a vital democratic-enlarged zone in the West and a promoter of stability in the East is timely and persuasive.”

The Big Bang - Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Kagan on the State of America

The New York Times Book Review – April 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them.

The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of American decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine Web site runs a dedicated blog, “Decline Watch.” Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism’s bipartisan credentials.

The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world.

As you’d expect, there are big differences between the two. Kagan barely mentions the Iraq war in “The World America Made,” and certainly feels no need to explain his past enthusiasm for a decision that many now regard as a calamity. By contrast, Brzezinski is scathing in “Strategic Vision,” judging Iraq “a costly diversion” from the fight against Al Qaeda. The war, he says, was justified by dubious claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that “evaporated altogether within a few months” and that sapped America’s international standing. [Read the full article...]

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

Editor — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:59:53 +0000

“One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of “privateers”; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s Drift argues that we’ve drifted away from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we’ve arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today’s war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan’s radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.

Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a “loud and jangly” political debate about how, when, and where to apply America’s strength and power–and who gets to make those decisions.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow has hosted the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC since 2008. Before that, she was at Air America Radio for the duration of that underappreciated enterprise. She has a doctorate in politics from Oxford and a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford. She lives in rural western Massachusetts and New York City with her partner, artist Susan Mikula, and an enormous dog.

Editorial Reviews

“Written with the flair for scintillating satire that has endeared Rachel Maddow to liberals and moderates alike–and infuriated neo-conservatives, evangelicals, and some tea partiers–Drift is funny, rich, and right. But at its end, when you put it down, you will be troubled. We are losing our republic and Ms. Maddow tells you why.” –LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

“America is in urgent need of a real debate over its addiction to sprawling militarism and endless war. It affects, and degrades, every aspect of national life: political, cultural, and economic. Nobody is better positioned to trigger that debate than Rachel Maddow, and that’s exactly what she does in this startlingly insightful and well-written book. By stripping away the propaganda that distorts national security policy and laying bare its reality, Maddow has written one of those rare political books that can transform Americans’ understanding of what their government is actually doing.” –GLENN GREENWALD, columnist for Salon and author of Liberty and Justice for Some

“Brilliant book. Drift will stun Americans with its portrait of a hyperventilating United States that has produced too many real live Dr. Strangelove moments. Drawing from thoughtful, national interest-driven conservatives and not just the liberal establishment, Maddow makes the case that what ought to be a strong nation is instead risking shipwreck, by letting war and military matters escape real political and economic gravitational forces. Every page informs and angers at the same time.” - –STEVE CLEMONS, Washington editor-at-large, The Atlantic

Rachel Maddow: The Fresh Air Interview

NPR Book Review – March 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

For much of the past decade, journalist Rachel Maddow has hosted her own radio and TV shows. And for much of that time, the popular MSNBC host has been thinking about how the United States uses military force — and how it starts and end wars.

Maddow’s new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war.

“Politically, secrecy is a great excuse,” Maddow tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that’s a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that’s a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.”

That lack of accountability, says Maddow, lets America’s national defense operate without public oversight or knowledge. [Read the full article...]

How War Came Home to Stay - ‘Drift’ by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC Traces American Militarism

The New York Times Book Review – March 28, 2012 (Excerpt)

A squabble is a noisy quarrel over a trivial matter. A polemic is an aggressive attack on the opinions and principles of others. A screaming match is a contest in which contradictory points are stubbornly reiterated, with no regard for whatever else has been said. A political talk show is a gladiatorial contest in which squabbles, polemics and screaming matches are exploited for their entertainment value.

A book by the host of a political talk show is often an ancillary product or marketing tool. But “Drift,” by Rachel Maddow, whose show is on MSNBC, is much more. It is an argument — a sustained, lucid case in which points are made logically and backed by evidence and reason. What’s more, it follows one main idea through nearly a half-century. The subtitle, “The Unmooring of American Military Power,” explains exactly what “Drift” is about.

Ms. Maddow’s point is that the way we go to war has changed: that there has been an expansion of presidential power, a corresponding collapse of Congressional backbone and a diminution of public attention. She does not see this in conspiratorial terms, but she has an explanation for the step-by-step way it evolved. She thinks the transformation began with a question asked by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as he prepared to more than double the ground forces in Vietnam: “You don’t think I oughta have a joint session, do you?” Did he need authorization from Congress, he asked the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to make a troop deployment like that? [Read the full article...]

Executive Overreach - ‘Drift,’ by Rachel Maddow

The New York Times Book Review – April 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

Some readers will come to Rachel Maddow’s first book expecting an entertaining left-wing screed against the military. They may be surprised to discover instead a lively but serious argument about American history.

Fox News fans will be taken aback to find a blurb from none other than Roger Ailes, that conservative channel’s creator, declaring that “Drift” offers “valid arguments” and is “a book worth reading.” Meanwhile, devotees of Maddow’s liberal MSNBC show may raise their eyebrows at her declaration that “my generation of veterans” is “a huge part of why I’m bullish on America’s capacity to adapt, lead and succeed in the 21st century.”

If the book lures readers briefly from their political silos, it will be because Maddow’s thesis crosses ideological lines. Like the Tea Partiers, she believes that the United States must return to the lost principles of the nation’s founders — in this case a suspicion of standing armies and a deep reluctance to go to war. “America’s structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong,” she declares. “It’s the way the founders set us up.” [Read the full article...]

‘Drift’: Rachel Maddow On Why We Go To War

NPR Book Review – May 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

In past wars, the U.S. practically dismantled its military after the troops came home. But today, says MSNBC News anchor and writer Rachel Maddow, we find ourselves in a state of almost permanent war.

In her new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Maddow invokes Thomas Jefferson, pointing out that one of Jefferson’s main concerns was the danger of having a large military.

“That was a really animating thing going on for the Founding Fathers. I mean, they were very upset about what was going on with the British Empire and the British king, and there’s a reason that the ‘quartering soldiers’ thing, which seems so random, is foundational in our founding documents,” she says.

Her book argues that the U.S. military has grown bloated partially because the nation is insulated from the wars its soldiers fight. [Read the full article...]

Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War by Guy Gugliotta

Editor — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:33:01 +0000

The modern United States Capitol is a triumph of both engineering and design. From its 9-million-pound cast-iron dome to the dazzling opulence of the President’s Room and the Senate corridors, the Capitol is one of the most renowned buildings in the world. But the history of the U.S. Capitol is also the history of America’s most tumultuous years. As the new Capitol rose above Washington’s skyline, battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Ground was broken just months after Congress adopted the compromise of 1850, which was supposed to settle the “slavery question” for all time. The statue Freedom was placed atop the Capitol’s new dome in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg.

In Freedom’s Cap, the award-winning journalist Guy Gugliotta recounts the history and broader meaning of the Capitol building through the lives of the three men most responsible for its construction. We owe the building’s scale and magnificence to none other than Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol’s staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. Davis’s protégé and the Capitol’s lead engineer, Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, became quartermaster general of the Union Army and never forgave Davis for his betrayal of the nation. The Capitol’s brilliant architect and Meigs’s longtime rival, Thomas U. Walter, defended slavery at the beginning of the war but eventually turned fiercely against the South.

In impeccable detail, Gugliotta captures the clash of personalities behind the building of the Capitol and the unique engineering, architectural, design, and political challenges the three men collectively overcame to create the iconic seat of American government.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Guy Gugliotta

Guy Gugliotta covered Congress during a sixteen-year career as a national reporter for The Washington Post and for the last six years has been a freelance writer. He has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, Discover, and Smithsonian. He is the coauthor of Kings of Cocaine.

Editorial Reviews

“In this fascinating and well-written narrative, Guy Gugliotta tells the story of the rebuilding of the U.S . Capitol, an enterprise that occupied more than a decade before and during the Civil War. Combining the history of politics, art, and engineering, it shows how the monumental project’s party, personal, and sectional rivalries reflected the crisis, and triumph, of a divided nation.” —Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“In this splendidly researched and engagingly written new book, Guy Gugliotta deftly tells the intimately connected stories of the construction of the Capitol and the destruction of the Union. This is an original and compelling tale of how history really happens.” —Jon Meacham, former editor of Newsweek and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“This fascinating narrative ties together America’s preeminent architectural symbol and its most wrenching struggle. The building of the Capitol dome, an expression of unity, occurred as the nation was tearing itself apart in the lead-up to the Civil War. Guy Gugliotta’s deeply researched tale features Montgomery Meigs and Jefferson Davis, whose partnership and subsequent clash mirrored their turbulent times.” —Walter Isaacson, former chairman and CEO of CNN and author of Steve Jobs

“Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War” by Guy Gugliotta

The Washington Post Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

The United States Capitol, much like this city’s other architectural glory, the National Cathedral, is as much a work in progress as a finished product. Completed nearly a century and a half ago, it has been repaired and improved almost nonstop. The famous statue of “Freedom,” the magnificent dome upon which it stands, the stunning paintings and frescoes by Constantino Brumidi, the hidden systems by which the vast building is heated and cooled — all these and countless other features have been worked on and, wherever possible, modernized, a process that seeks to maintain the Capitol’s 19th-century grandeur while making it a hospitable environment in which to conduct the nation’s business — when, that is, Congress is in the mood.

Still, the construction of the Capitol as the world has known it since “Freedom” was put in place in the late autumn of 1863 is a story unto itself — the story of the building’s expansion in the 1850s and ’60s from the comparatively small early 19th-century original — and Guy Gugliotta tells it superbly in “Freedom’s Cap.” He takes his title from the original design submitted in 1856 by Thomas Crawford, “an American sculptor based in Rome,” in which the “elegantly draped” figure of a woman wore a “ ‘liberty cap,’ the symbol from classical antiquity of a manumitted slave.” This was disagreeable to the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, who had taken a powerful interest in the Capitol’s improvement but did not want anything associated with anti-slavery sentiments to be memorialized in the building. As Gugliotta explains, eventually the “liberty cap” was replaced by the somewhat bizarre “crest of feathers and a bird’s head” with which it has been adorned to this day, but he chooses, properly, to see the Capitol itself as the “cap,” worn by a nation whose people are now far more free than they were when the statue was installed. [Read the full article...]

The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People by Neil Hegarty

Editor — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:18:03 +0000

A intriguing new take on Irish history, exploring the ways in which outside influences have shaped Ireland from 433 B.C. to the modern day.

Author Neil Hegarty gives readers a fresh perspective on Irish history in this comprehensive and engaging book that places Ireland in an international context. Hegarty offers a new look at Irish history, challenging the accepted stories and long-held myths associated with Ireland. This book transports readers to the Ireland of the past, and, through events such as the Europe’s 16th century religious wars, the French and American revolutions, and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II, examines how world events have shaped the country from 8000 BC to the present. Spanning Irish history from the first settlement to the current financial crisis, this book is sure to fascinate anyone who is interested in Ireland and its past.

About Neil Hegarty

NEIL HEGARTY’s short fiction and essays have been published widely, and his writing has appeared in the Irish Times and Daily Telegraph. Neil holds a PhD in English literature from Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Editorial Review

This island nation’s history teems with explosive, emotional issues that partisans tend to view in simplistic, black-and-white terms; such readers will find no encouragement here. “Nothing reduces me to despair more than a vision of Irish history that reduces the debate about the past to a simple paradigm of the Irish versus the English, who was right and who was wrong, as if history could be reduced to a crude morality play,” writes Irish author Hegarty (Dublin: A View from the Ground, 2008, etc.) at the outset of this ambitious survey of nearly 1,600 years of Irish history. His primary theme is that Ireland is a land repeatedly invaded and settled by foreigners, from the Vikings who founded Dublin to the Scottish Presbyterians invited into Ulster by the government of James I, and that each of these groups has contributed to the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity and conflicts on this divided island. Ireland has also been deeply affected by such outside influences as the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution, and has in turn affected Europe and North America by the almost constant emigration of its people. Hegarty highlights the complexities underlying Ireland’s ongoing conflicts and sails through them without passing judgments, calmly observing as one communal massacre inspires another, or as British government policies fail to relieve the devastation of the Famine, or the Irish Free State descends into civil war. The broad scope of the work requires that the author move along briskly. There is no dreary catalogue of early Irish kings; even such giants as Oliver Cromwell and Charles Parnell receive only about a dozen each, and cultural history is given short shrift. The resulting focus on political events and social movements at the expense of colorful personalities and illuminating anecdotes, combined with Hegarty’s consistently objective tone, render the narrative sometimes disappointingly bland but never dry. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People” by Neil Hegarty

The Washington Post Book Review – March 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

The collapse of the Celtic Tiger four years ago, in a spectacular collision of private and public corruption amid a wildly inflated real estate bubble, was a dreadful blow to the people of Ireland, who with some justification thought that after centuries of poverty and disappointment, their country had at last come into its own. As Neil Hegarty writes in “The Story of Ireland,” however, the implosion was easily explained by Irish history:

“There are specific cultural reasons why such a situation evolved. The history of Ireland had propagated a sense of failure and of inferiority, encapsulated in the forced emigration of generation after generation of young people in search of opportunities that their homeland simply could not provide. The economic boom seemed to put this traumatic history firmly in the past: it belonged in another era — virtually in another country. The ongoing moves towards resolving what had seemed an intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, moreover, served to copper-fasten this sensation that Ireland had indeed left its scarred past behind. The result was exuberance and confidence on a widespread scale.” [Read the full article...]

The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs by David C. Unger

Editor — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:36:10 +0000

America is trapped in a state of war that has consumed our national life since before Pearl Harbor. Over seven decades and several bloody wars, Democratic and Republican politicians alike have assembled an increasing complicated—and increasingly ineffective—network of security services. Trillions of tax dollars have been diverted from essential domestic needs while the Pentagon created a worldwide web of military bases, inventing new American security interests where none previously existed. Yet this pursuit has not only damaged our democratic institutions and undermined our economic strength—it has fundamentally failed to make us safer.

In The Emergency State, senior New York Times journalist David C. Unger reveals the hidden costs of America’s obsessive pursuit of absolute national security, showing how this narrow-minded emphasis on security came to distort our political life. Unger reminds us that in the first 150 years of the American republic the U.S. valued limited military intervention abroad, along with the checks and balances put in place by the founding fathers. Yet American history took a sharp turn during and just after World War II, when we began building a vast and cumbersome complex of national security institutions and beliefs. Originally designed to wage hot war against Germany and cold war against the Soviet Union, our security bureaucracy has become remarkably ineffective at confronting the elusive, non-state sponsored threats we now face.

The Emergency State traces a series of missed opportunities—from the end of World War II to the election of Barak Obama—when we could have paused to rethink our defense strategy and didn’t. We have ultimately failed to dismantle our outdated national security state because both parties are equally responsible for its expansion. While countless books have exposed the damage wrought by George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” Unger shows it was only the natural culmination of decades of bipartisan emergency state logic—and argues that Obama, along with many previous Democratic presidents, has failed to shift course in any meaningful way.

The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security At All Costs reveals the depth of folly into which we’ve fallen, as Americans eagerly trade away the country’s greatest strengths for a fleeting illusion of safety. Provocative, insightful, and refreshingly nonpartisan, The Emergency State is the definitive untold story of how America became this vulnerable—and how it can build true security again.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About David C. Unger

DAVID C. UNGER has been an editorial writer at The New York Times for more than thirty years—where he writes about foreign policy, international economics, and military issues–and a member of the paper’s Editorial Board for twenty-two years. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and teaches courses in American Foreign Policy at the Bologna Center of The Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Editorial Reviews

“David Unger”s informative, historical and incisive narrative clearly illustrates that that the challenge of upholding democratic principles is a constantly evolving challenge for even the most mature of democracies and makes clear that there is no trade-off between security and the respect for human rights and civil liberties.” - Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations (1997-2006)

“In The Emergency State, David Unger documents with great passion as well as precision how the emergency state, started by Roosevelt and continued by other Presidents since, has not only undermined our civil liberties but has failed to promote our security or, in recent times, improved our prosperity. His 10 point plan for restoring a constitutional democracy deserves serious debate.” - Morton H. Halperin, senior adviser at the Open Society Foundations

“I have read David Unger’s excellent book on U.S. foreign policy with interest. Mr Unger clearly has a keen grasp of the contradictions in America’s relationship with the outside world. I hope that this book will find a wide audience; then perhaps we can have an honest debate about where the true balance of U.S. interests lies.” - Erik Jones, Director of Bologna Institute for Policy Research

Fear Factor - David C. Unger’s ‘The Emergency State’

The New York Times Book Review – March 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

With Osama bin Laden dead, American troops leaving Iraq, the economy still sputtering and Congress locked in yet another budget showdown, one thing that seems clear is that Washington will very likely cut military spending sometime soon. This will come as welcome news to David C. Unger, author of “The Emergency State” and an editorial writer for The New York Times. In this angry new book, Unger deplores what he sees as Washington’s obsession with security and overreliance on military and intelligence capabilities, arguing that they are dangerous perversions of the country’s Jeffersonian traditions.

Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, in Unger’s view, have inflated external threats in order to build up a vast and unaccountable national security machine that runs roughshod over the framers’ design for a modest government with plenty of internal checks and few international obligations. This emergency state, as Unger calls it, not only expands presidential powers, wastes money and tramples the rights of Americans and foreigners, but it also fails to guard the country from today’s real dangers.

In a narrative familiar to anyone who’s leafed through the growing library of books on Imperial America, Unger takes up his tale in 1941, when Roosevelt — whom Unger calls “the godfather” of the emergency state — maneuvered an isolationist Congress and an indifferent American public into siding with Britain in its fight against Germany. Setting a disturbingly familiar precedent, Roosevelt also relied on extralegal means to track domestic “subversives” — who were sometimes just political opponents. [Read the full article...]

“Author” Janie Johnson – Conservatism, Patriotism, and… Optimism?

Editor — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:56:04 +0000

It was this morning when I checked my social networking accounts, Twitter being one of them. I, personally, find Twitter annoying. It seems running a Twitter account is not about communication and following other people’s opinion; it’s mostly about collecting so-called followers to blast your message into thousands of faces.

One of those collectors with 105,565 tweets and 23,508 followers at the time of this writing is “author” Janie Johnson. I put the word “author” into quotation marks, because, according to Amazon.Com, she has published one book on the Kindle Store, and, as we all know, everybody can put anything resembling a book on Kindle.

According to her Twitter profile:

Oops! Did I miss her second book? Well, not quite. I just can’t find any reference other than her website. I admit, though, that my “research” might be flawed…

Nevertheless, what caught my attention was not the conservatism (nothing wrong with that), the patriotism (nothing wrong with that, either), but, strangely enough the “optimism” in her messages.

Let me quote her last three tweets I found today:

If when you can’t win an argument, name call, you just get louder or make personal attacks, you might be a Liberal!
Hate speech is all you got! … You have a sick mind and a black heart…
You really should not talk about your friends and Obama that way – you know they are watching you. Janie

Well, excuse me for being ignorant, but where is the optimism…? All I see is that conservatism and patriotism is promoted through… well, hate speech, definitely not a typical American attribute.

But let’s get to the point:

Firstly, every author should know that you should not promote your work based on negativity. It ticks off too many potential readers, and it damages your reputation (unless, of course, you are Ed Koch, who insults so eloquently).

Secondly, as a publisher I would stay away from any literature that is based on hate, and Janie Johnson is driven by hate. Hate speech goes along with misinformation, as history has shown (The name Goebbels comes to mind). Again, it damages the reputation not only of the author but also that of the publisher.

Thirdly, hate speech, as it is used by Janie Johnson, will not sit well with the majority of American citizens. It is simply the wrong message when it comes to promoting conservatism, patriotism, and optimism.

Last, but not least, this post reflects my very personal opinion and is, of course, not necessarily shared by others.

You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South by Stephanie Deutsch

Editor — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:09:09 +0000

Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, first met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon. By charting the lives of these two men both before and after the meeting, Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement. Trim and vital at just shy of fifty, Rosenwald was the extraordinarily rich chairman of one of the nation’s largest businesses, interested in using his fortune to do good not just in his own Jewish community but also to promote the well-being of African Americans.

Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years. He had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and drunk tea with Queen Victoria, but he had also been assaulted on a street in New York City. He had suffered personal heartbreak, years of overwork, and the discouraging knowledge that, despite his optimism and considerable success, conditions for African Americans were not improving as he had assumed they would. From within his own community, Washington faced the bitter charge of accommodationism that haunts his legacy to this day. Despite their differences, the two men would work together well and their collaboration would lead to the building of five thousand schoolhouses. By the time segregation ended, the “Rosenwald Schools” that sprang from this unlikely partnership were educating one third of the South’s African American children. These schoolhouses represent a significant step in the ongoing endeavor to bring high quality education to every child in the United States—an ideal that remains to be realized even today.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Stephanie Deutsch

Stephanie Deutsch is a writer and critic living in Washington, DC. She has written as well for The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Millions blog and various neighborhood newspapers. I edited and wrote the Introduction to Capitol Hill: Beyond the Monuments, a book of photographs published in 1996 by the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop.

Editorial Review

The two met in Chicago in 1911: “Washington regularly cultivated wealthy people who might donate money to Tuskegee Institute” and Rosenwald was “interested in using his money promote the well-being of African Americans.” Both were well known and well respected at the time of their first encounter. But where Rosenwald was the middle-class son of Jewish immigrant parents who worked their way from poverty into affluence, Washington was an ex-slave who had to fight for everything he had, including an education. Their remarkable collaboration produced almost 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” scattered throughout “every state of the American South, from Maryland to Texas.” Black children otherwise denied access to public instruction because of Jim Crow laws could count on receiving a quality education that would help them improve their lives. But the Rosenwald schools did more than educate a black underclass that lived in the shadow of a racist white society. As Deutsch notes, they gave rise to “the parents of the generation who marched and sang and risked their lives in the revolution for equal justice under law.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘Schoolhouse’: Rosenwald Schools In The South

NPR Book Review – March 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington came from vastly different backgrounds.

Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., was one of the richest men in America; Washington rose out of slavery to become a civil rights leader. But their meeting led eventually to the construction of thousands of schools for black children in the segregated South.

Stephanie Deutsch tells the story of their friendship in her new book You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South.

When Rosenwald decided to start giving his money away, he started within the Jewish community — funding schools and hospitals. But Deutsch tells Guy Raz, host of weekends onAll Things Considered, that a 1908 race riot in Rosenwald’s hometown of Springfield, Ill., made him think twice about the treatment of African-Americans in the United States.

“In one of his speeches, he said, ‘We like to look down on the Russians because of the way they treat the Jews, and yet we turn around, and the way we treat our African-Americans is not much better,’” Deutsch says.

After they met, Washington suggested to Rosenwald the idea of constructing the new schools, Deutsch says.

“His big belief was that education was the building block on which people would build better lives and stronger lives,” she says. [Read the full article...]

Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn’t Work at All Works So Well by Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards

Editor — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:57:18 +0000

Voters often make irrational decisions based on inaccurate and irrelevant information. Politicians are often inept, corrupt, or out of touch with the will of the people. Elections can be determined by the design of the ballot and the gerrymandered borders of a district. And yet, despite voters who choose candidates according to the boxer–brief dichotomy and politicians who struggle to put together a coherent sentence, democracy works exceptionally well: citizens of democracies are healthier, happier, and freer than citizens of other countries. In Democracy Despite Itself, Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards explore this seeming paradox: How can democracy lead to such successful outcomes when the defining characteristic of democracy, elections, is so flawed? Oppenheimer, a psychologist, and Edwards, a political scientist, draw on cutting-edge research in their fields to investigate the question and suggest an answer.

Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences. Mass participation in contested elections creates psychological pressure for voters to be better citizens and for politicians to be better leaders; alternating power regularly between different factions helps avoid instability; citizens are sometimes able to overcome their ignorance and make informed choices; and voters do have the power to punish politicians for excessively bad behavior. The brilliance of democracy, write Oppenheimer and Edwards, does not lie in the people’s ability to pick superior leaders. It lies in the many ways that it subtly encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to work toward building a better society.

About Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards

Danny Oppenheimer is Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at Princeton University.

Mike Edwards founded and regularly contributes to Leftfielder.org, a blog on politics and media.

“Democracy Despite Itself Why a System that Shouldn’t Work at All Works So Well” by Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards

The Washington Post Book Review – March 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

Once upon a time, a fair number of Americans thought the country might have to abandon democracy. In June 1932, during the worst days of the Depression, the magazine Vanity Fair pleaded: “Appoint a dictator!” Just before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, the movie “Gabriel Over the White House” depicted how a fictional president solved the economic crisis and brought world peace — by imposing one-man rule. It got good reviews and did well at the box office.

Notwithstanding all the troubles of recent years, we seldom hear explicit anti-democratic sentiments anymore. (One exception is Woody Allen, who wished that President Obama “could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”) In “Democracy Despite Itself,” Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards explain why: In short, democracy works. Countries that decide things through elections have more freedom and a higher quality of life than those that don’t.

The authors acknowledge that democracies have sometimes failed in their basic functions. But they also cite abundant evidence that nondemocratic regimes are much more likely to restrict speech, ban “unapproved” religions and throw people in jail without due process of law. Contary to myth, dictatorships do not compensate for these failings by making the trains run on time. Oppenheimer and Edwards explain that democracies not only secure more freedom, they tend to deliver better public services. [Read the full article...]

The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Editor — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:13:55 +0000

The New Jim Crow was initially published with a modest first printing and reasonable expectations for a hard-hitting book on a tough topic. Now, ten-plus printings later, the long-awaited paperback version of the book Lani Guinier calls “brave and bold,” and Pulitzer Prize–winner David Levering Lewis calls “stunning,” will at last be available.

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.

Featured on The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy Now, and C-Span’s Washington Journal, The New Jim Crow has become an overnight phenomenon, sparking a much-needed conversation—including a recent mention by Cornel West on Real Time with Bill Maher&mdas;about ways in which our system of mass incarceration has come to resemble systems of racial control from a different era.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Michelle Alexander

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded the national campaign against racial profiling. At the beginning of her career she served as a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court for Justice Harry Blackmun. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama’s political success and Oprah Winfrey’s financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control (More African Americans are under correctional control today… than were enslaved in 1850). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: most Americans know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that. – Publishers Weekly

In this explosive debut, Alexander (Law/Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity) argues that the imprisonment of unusually large numbers of young blacks and Latinos—most harshly sentenced for possession or sale of illegal drugs, mainly marijuana—constitutes “a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control.” The “warehousing” of inner-city youths, she writes, is a new form of Jim Crow under which drug offenders—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—are denied employment, housing, education and public benefits; face a lifetime of shame; and rarely successfully integrate into mainstream society. The author blames the situation mainly on the War on Drugs, begun by Ronald Reagan in 1982, which grew out of demands for “law and order” that were actually a racially coded backlash to the civil-rights movement. The situation continues because of racial indifference, not racial bias, she writes. Many will dismiss the author’s assertions; others will find her observations persuasive enough to give pause. Most people who use or sell illegal drugs are white, but in many states 90 percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses are black or Latino. Police departments, given financial incentives—cash grants and the right to keep confiscated cash and assets from drug raids—to focus on drug enforcement, find it easier to send SWAT teams into poor neighborhoods, where they will face less political backlash, than into gated communities and college frat houses. Also, most people do not care what happens to drug criminals, feeling that “they get what they deserve.” So what’s to be done? Alexander writes that civil-rights leaders, reluctant to advocate for criminals, remain quiet on the issue; President Obama, an admitted former user of illegal drugs, is not in a position to offer leadership; and policymakers offer only piecemeal reforms. She hopes a new grassroots movement will foster frank discussion about race, cultivate an ethic of compassion for all and end the drug war and mass incarceration. – Kirkus Reviews

Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate

The New York Times Book Review – March 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Garry McCarthy, a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, did not expect to hear anything too startling when he appeared at a conference on drug policy organized last year by an African-American minister in Newark, where he was the police director.

But then a law professor named Michelle Alexander took the stage and delivered an impassioned speech attacking the war on drugs as a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow — and received a two-minute standing ovation from the 500 people in the audience.

“These were not young people living in high-crime neighborhoods,” Mr. McCarthy, now police superintendent in Chicago, recalled in a telephone interview. “This was the black middle class.”

“I don’t believe in the government conspiracy, but what you have to accept is that that narrative exists in the community and has to be addressed,” he said. “That was my real a-ha moment.”

Mr. McCarthy is not alone. During the past two years Professor Alexander has been provoking such moments across the country — and across the political spectrum — with her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which has become a surprise best seller since its paperback version came out in January. Sales have totaled some 175,000 copies after an initial hardcover printing of a mere 3,000, according to the publisher, the New Press. [Read the full article...]

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren

Editor — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:10:26 +0000

From a State Department insider, the first account of our blundering efforts to rebuild Iraq–a shocking and rollicking true-life tale of Americans abroad

Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity?

According to Peter Van Buren, we bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge–that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details, with laser-like irony, his yearlong encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world’s largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can’t rebuild a country without first picking up the trash.

Darkly funny while deadly serious, We Meant Well is a tragicomic voyage of ineptitude and corruption that leaves its writer–and readers–appalled and disillusioned but wiser.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Peter Van Buren

Peter Van Buren has served with the Foreign Service for over 23 years. He received a Meritorious Honor Award for assistance to Americans following the Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, a Superior Honor Award for helping an American rape victim in Japan and another award for work in the Tsunami Relief efforts in Thailand. Previous assignments include Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. He volunteered for Iraq service, and was assigned to ePRT duty 2009-2010. His tour extended past the withdrawal of the last combat troops.

Van Buren worked extensively with the military while overseeing evacuation planning in Japan and Korea. This experience included multiple field exercises, plus civil-military work in Seoul, Tokyo, Hawaii and Sydney with allies from the UK, Australia and elsewhere. The Marine Corps selected Van Buren to travel to Camp Lejeune in 2006 to participate in a field exercise that included simulated Iraqi conditions. Van Buren spent a year on the Hill in the Department of State’s Congressional Liaison Office.

Van Buren speaks Japanese, Chinese Mandarin and some Korean. Born in New York City, he lives in Virginia. This is his first book.

Editorial Reviews

One diplomat’s darkly humorous and ultimately scathing assault on just about everything the military and the State Department have done — or tried to do — since the invasion of Iraq. The title says it all.” –Steven Myers, New York Times

“In this shocking and darkly hilarious exposé of the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, former State Department team leader Van Buren describes the tragicomedy that has been American efforts at nation building, marked by bizarre decisions and wrongheaded priorities… “We made things in Iraq look the way we wanted them to look,” Van Buren writes. With lyrical prose and biting wit, this book reveals the devastating arrogance of imperial ambition and folly.”—Publishers Weekly

“Long after the self-serving memoirs of people named Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld are consigned to some landfill, this unsparing and very funny chronicle will remain on the short list of books essential to understanding America’s Iraq War. Here is nation-building as it looks from the inside—waste, folly, and sheer silliness included.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

‘Hallwalkers’: The Ghosts Of The State Department

NPR Book Review – February 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

The halls of the State Department are haunted, not by actual ghosts, but by people who might as well be ghosts: whistleblowers, people who angered someone powerful and people who for one reason or another, can’t be fired.

“People like me, that the State Department no longer wants, but for some reason can’t or won’t fire, are assigned to what we call ‘hallwalking,’” says author Peter Van Buren.

Hallwalkers are stripped of their security clearances, their desks and their duties — left to wander aimlessly up and down the halls of that massive building. Sometimes they’re required to show up in the morning to get paid; sometimes they’re allowed to telecommute from home.

After 23 years in the Foreign Service, Van Buren joined the ranks of the hallwalkers last fall, when he published a scathing account of his year working on what he believed were wasteful reconstruction projects in Iraq.

The book is called We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Van Buren says all books published by State employees are subject to an approval process, and his book was no exception.

“I suspect that the State Department forgot about me and approved the book,” Van Buren says. [Read the full article...]

The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia by Angus Roxburgh

Editor — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:37:28 +0000

Russia under Vladimir Putin has proved a prickly partner for the West, a far cry from the democratic ally many hoped for when the Soviet Union collapsed. Abroad, Putin has used Russia’s energy strength as a foreign policy weapon, while at home he has cracked down on opponents, adamant that only he has the right vision for his country’s future.

Former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh charts the dramatic fight for Russia’s future under Vladimir Putin—how the former KGB man changed from reformer to autocrat; how he sought the West’s respect but earned its fear; how he cracked down on his rivals at home and burnished a flamboyant personality cult, one day saving snow leopards or horseback riding bare-chested, the next tongue-lashing Western audiences. Drawing on dozens of exclusive interviews in Russia, where he worked as a Kremlin insider advising Putin on press relations, Roxburgh also argues that the West threw away chances to bring Russia in from the cold by failing to understand its fears and aspirations following the collapse of communism.

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About Angus Roxburgh

Angus Roxburgh is one of Britain’s most distinguished foreign correspondents. An author and renowned journalist, he was the Sunday Times Moscow Correspondent in the 1980s until he was expelled from the Soviet Union in a tit-for-tat espionage row. He returned in the 1990s and was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. Subsequently, he worked as an advisor and speechwriter for Putin’s communications team, a role which gave him unrivalled access to the Kremlin’s inner circle.

Editorial Reviews

“A serious book that portrays a Russian administration at sea in a world most of its officials did not comprehend. Putin himself emerges as a more complex character than the epithet “strongman” would suggest…Every chapter of this book is worth reading.” – The Independent (UK)

“[A] lively and absorbing study of the Putin years.” - The Guardian (UK)

Putin 101: Understanding Russia’s ‘Strongman’

NPR Book Review – February 28, 2012 (Excerpt)

Russia’s presidential election is on Saturday. The projected winner will be the current prime minister — and former president — Vladimir Putin, the subject of a new biography,The Strongman. Author Angus Roxburgh is a longtime journalist who served briefly as a public relations advisor to the Kremlin. He joined Morning Edition’s David Greene to discuss the complicated figure who dominates and defines Russian politics.

On Putin’s ability to manipulate others

I think it’s part of his KGB training … When asked what his job in the KGB was, he put it very vaguely. He said, “My job is to mingle with people.” And part of that, I think, is his ability to make people feel very comfortable. With President Bush, I think he exercised that, sort of, almost control over him. He made George W. Bush believe that Putin was a man he could trust and could do business with.

On Putin’s personal and political complexity

It’s very easy to paint Putin in black-and-white terms, but actually, he’s a more complex character. When he first came to power, in those first years, he said quite openly to Western leaders that he wanted to bring Russia back in from the cold. He even spoke about joining NATO, and for him it was a symbol that Russia could become part of the West again. I think that he felt constantly rebuffed by the West. He faced an American president in George Bush who was determined to build a missile shield to protect the West from nuclear missiles, which Russia – rightly or wrongly – believed was aimed against them. He also saw the West expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders. From our point of view there was no malicious intent in that. But from his point of view, it looked as if Russia was being sort of encircled by a military alliance. [Read the full article...]