I know book reviews bore everyone, but the journal where I published this doesn’t post electronic versions of book reviews. So I thought this would be a good place to put it for internet accessibility. I tried to make this interesting by focusing on trends in NK,...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tobias Gibson of Westminster College. In recent days, there have been reports of U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan, Pakistan. According to the New York...
I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I...
REK: I am pleased to guest-post my friend Dave’s longer, fuller version of a book review he wrote for CSIS. My thanks to CSIS as well. If you aren’t reading Dave yet, I’d recommend it. “Is America...
The running through of the bullsSomeone asked me the other day whether I had read any books for fun recently. Caught up as I was in compiling the lit review for one project and writing lectures for an introductory class, I couldn't think of anything--the words "fun" and "reading" at the moment were almost precise antitheses. (Having read large numbers of scholarly treatises is enjoyable. Plowing through large numbers of monographs is tedium.)And then it struck me that I had in fact read completely unrequired books recently. And that one of them was fantastic--so good, in fact, that it was...
Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe that a careful study of those events are pertinent for American and European students of global politics today as they attempt to contextualize the challenges to American military might and Western cultural hegemony continuously pulsating onto the global stage from the remote corners of South Asia. A chronicle of 1857 is also useful to understand the fragility of a multicultural society in the...
I've had it. Recently I was asked to review a book that will not be named for a journal that will not be mentioned. It was by an author with a pretty good reputation with an excellent press on a subject that I am well informed on. (I won't mention names. Dan can take him or her to the woodshed later.) I thought I would be doing the field a service and forcing myself to read what I thought would be an entertaining book that I might not otherwise have the time to read. The problem: it is f&ck*ng mess.Actually that really isn't the real issue. The real problem is that I am absolutely positive...
I am less impressed with Daniel Wilson’s new book than my frenemy Drezner appears, and quite possibly because I so wanted it to be what Wilson admits, at the end of this diavlog, that it is certainly not: World War Z for anti-zombites, a fictionalized near-future scenario that throws lights on present-day socio-political conditions through the metaphor of killer robots rather than supernatural threats. How Wilson fails so spectacularly is the subject of my latest essay in Current Intelligence:In my view, there is almost no politics involved: nothing about how political institutions or...
Joshua Goldstein has a must-read book in press entitled Winning the War on War. I've seen the advance version and like many things about it, not least of which is the easy-reading style pitched at an informed lay audience, the way he begins with a thought experiment rather than with a bunch of statistics, then draws the reader through available scholarly research in an entertaining way to develop his argument. The thought experiment: imagine you're in a time machine moving backward from 2011 to prehistoric times, comparing a) the past ten years with the past twenty; b) the past twenty years...
Henry Farrell mentions Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty. Before proceeding, you should know three things:I have no connection, social or otherwise, with Francis Spufford.I am a philistine made almost incapable of reading literary fiction by years of journal articles and serious journalism.I am in no way an expert in any aspect of Soviet culture, politics, or history.Bearing these facts in mind, let me give the book my highest recommendation. A colleague brought back a copy from the UK at my request, so I've read the book well in advance of its American release (which has still not...
During World War II, teams of scientists raced to build the ultimate weapon: the atomic bomb. This weapon, everyone believed, was so powerful that it would force the Japanese to surrender immediately, eliminating the need for an extremely costly invasion of the Japanese main islands. They built two weapons using two different models: Little Boy, a uranium gun-style weapon, and, just in case the first one wasn't enough, the Fat Man, a plutonium implosion weapon. When the weapons were ready, President Truman, who knew nothing about the Manhattan Project until Roosevelt's death, struggled...
By now, you have probably heard about the recall of Thomas the Tank Engine toys, which are decorated with lead paint. While Lead-Foot Thomas is getting a lot of media attention right now, it's only the latest in a string of serious safety problems associated with products imported from China. Over the last few years, there have been repeated recalls on children's toys and jewelry due to lead contamination--all produced in China. Then there was the pet food debacle, in which wheat gluten tainted with melamine--a chemical that makes the protein content of the product appear higher and...