Politics Government Books

Nothing special. Just your average government book. The Appendix is fun to go through, though (electoral college numbers). Finding instances where the authors contradict themselves from page to page and chapter to chapter is also enjoyable.

I read this book because I would like to add a Russian component to the masters thesis I am working on, and thought it would give me good background. Alas, while the book was an entertaining read, it is practically useless academically. Mr Lucas' prose drips with outrage and disdain toward Russia's leaders--and I sometimes got the feeling that his attitude extends toward all Russian people. Although I don't have a deep background in this field, it was pretty obvious that Mr Lucas glosses over very complicated events in order to substantiate his own rather simplistic argument. The book quotes very few sources and mostly regurgitates events that have already been widely reported on. The author's lack of nuance is the most troubling--everything boils down to Putin/Russia = power/control/corruption/bad--which left me with very little I could use in a serious paper. By the end of the book, I had the impression that I had read a polemic summary of everything bad the mainstream Western media has had to say about Russia over the past couple of years, which might explain why it appears to have gotten so many good reviews from major news outlets.

Mr Lucas may be right, and he certainly has a valid opinion on Russia's politics and the direction the country is going. However, I hope that anyone who would like to read this book understands what it is--the strongly written personal opinion of a journalist who has been covering Russia for a few years. It is certainly not an objective or meticulous study of any aspect of contemporary Russia.

This book is the best I have read to make one understand the current relationship with the New Russia. Americans need to understand and come up to date on the attitude of the Russian leadership at this point. As long as oil is priced high, Russia will have the money to feed their economy and will contend with the United States in that part of the world. They will continue to be an enemy in our relations with Iran and will do everything they can to undermind our efforts. Putin is still very much operating as an old KGB operative with that mind set.

Russia is heading in an ominous direction that poses a threat to its own citizens, neighboring states and the world as a whole. This book with its disturbing message takes a hard look at the Russian ruling elite which emerged almost entirely from the ranks of the old KGB. Harboring resentment and malice against the West, this elite's attitude is crude and unsophisticated compared to the hostility of the Brussels Eurocracy towards the USA and Israel. The Russian government now directly competes with the West on various fronts, both economical and political. Genuine freedom of expression and the rule of law are long gone and the state has grabbed all political and economic power that matters. Putin's term "managed" or "sovereign" democracy really means a particularly malignant form of Tsarism or Fascism. In her 2004 book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, Anna Politkovskaya correctly observed that the brutality in Chechnya was an omen of Russia's future cruelty to all its citizens.

For a long time the West refused to notice. It should have woken up during the second Chechen war but instead there was only isolated protest in Europe and the USA, primarily from private bodies like the Jamestown Foundation and Italy's Radical Party. When Putin seized all influential media the West opened one eye then shut it again. When Khodorkovsky was jailed the same thing happened, and when the murder of dissidents and journalists became commonplace more observers expressed alarm though government criticism in the Western Alliance remained rather muted. This license to kill spread beyond the borders of Russia with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in the UK at a time when Tony Blair was almost embarrassingly amicable with Putin. More detailed information on the Litvinenko murder is available in Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, and The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy by Martin Sixsmith.

The media now portrays Putin as a hero that rescued the country from the "chaos" of the 1990s since the political class has revived the Soviet habit of revisionism. And it uses the Orthodox Church for spreading the ideology of patriotism and Russian nationalism, a policy that inflames xenophobia resulting in violent racist attacks on non-Slav and non-Russian citizens. There have also been signs that this church is reverting to its infamous history of antisemitism. Militarism and imperialism are integral to the new nationalism although Lucas believes that the aim is the "Finlandisation" of Europe rather than territorial expansion. In the West Russia has plenty of paid propagandists plus the romantically deluded species known as Russophiles for whom this failed state with its history of genocide, sadism and misery can do no wrong.

Lucas charts the rise of Putin (explained in horrifying detail in Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror) and the course of the new cold war in a thorough and systematic manner, concluding with advice for the West on how to conduct and win it. Although he doesn't soon expect any military threat, Russia's nuclear stockpile must be reckoned with. The weapons employed in this multifaceted undeclared war are oil, gas and the revenues generated by their export. Instead of allocating it to real needs, the Kremlin uses the income to further its imperialist ambitions by acquiring strategic assets in Europe. Some of it flows straight to the elite for private investment abroad.

This war is pursued while Russia suffers from demographic collapse, massive corruption and widespread lawlessness. Ex-KGB operatives are in charge of all major companies and state enterprises, ensuring more inefficiency and corruption. On the international stage, not only has Russia behaved like a thug against Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and Georgia, it is supplying weapons to rogue states Iran and Syria and their terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. There is no shortage of willing collaborators in the West, like previous German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, although western investors have begun to realize that investment in Russia is not worth the risk. When foreign companies resist state interference they risk confiscation. A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia exposes the mentality, power and incompetence of the ruling class.

The geopolitical implications are staggering, as the Putin gang eagerly befriends all enemies of the West. Russia is pursuing an energy policy aimed at strangling the liberal democracies by e.g. establishing a gas cartel. Lucas warns the West to get its house in order by inter alia cleaning up financial markets and reconsidering Russia's G8 membership. Should a criminal state be allowed to remain in a club of civilized nations? Whatever other evils result from Russia's abandonment of Western values, it is sure to become a more barbaric place for its citizens and a considerably more dangerous international player. One may confidently expect it to supply Iran with nuclear weapons technology and to cooperate with every loathsome thugocracy that defiles the planet.

Evidence is accumulating that Russia seeks an alliance with the Islamic world and a partial restoration of the Soviet Empire through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of which China is a member. The Kremlin ignores the real threat from China despite the particularly dire demographic and infrastructural implosion in Russia's far east. However, the Shanghai arrangement will bring the Turkic speaking states of Central Asia (plus Persian Tajikistan) back into the bear's embrace. Turkey's future role will be crucial; it remains to be seen where its recent Islamist trend will take it and how its foreign policy might change in case of almost certain exclusion from the inner core of the EU. Of course economic ties to Europe are assured but the country might establish closer relations with the aforementioned Central Asian states.

Should Israel be forced to act against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah an intensified Russian engagement in the Middle East conflict cannot be excluded. It might reluctantly be drawn into direct military intervention by its humiliated and devastated allies in the region. For those interested in prophetic speculation, I recommend Epicenter by Joel Rosenberg, an engrossing book based on the prophecies of Ezekiel about an anti-Israel confederacy which increasingly resembles an expanded axis of evil, an anti-western alliance that Russia is so vigorously pursuing.

After reading such reviews no wonder West is on alarm on what is going on in Russia.
Russia is a country which has power.
It is understandable US feels threaten, because weak "partner" is always better than a strong partner, in a politic which just declare DEMOCRACY as a true value. There is nothing democratic in US position in jumping all other the world including IRAQ, and showing "them" who has the power.
So, Mister Lucas, before you start writing you book, explore the facts.
Sure, Russians consider Estonians fascists, they act like ones. They give their country to Nascists (is it OK now? Is it Adolf Hitler an American Hero now? Are you rewriting the history to make Hitler look good?) They worship fascists and built memorial in their honor (how democratic was Hitler?) Do you want one? They destroy the memorial built in the honor of Russian Soldier. The soldier, who freed this country from Hitler and his regime, and POOR Estonians lived better than any other republics in FSU. They start begging for Western help when Russia stopped providing for them.
Russians lost 27 millions of soldiers fighting Hitler.
How many American soldiers were lost?
How many houses and businesses in America were destroyed because of Hitler?
How many people suffer from hunger because Hitler's soldiers took food from them?
You, Americans, don't have memory of this war in your country.
Russians have plenty. Think about it. Every family was affected.
If Latvian leader come to Russia and join Mister Bush to celebrate Victory Day, it is not Estonian's, Latvian's or Lithuanian business to criticise Russian politic on this day. It was beyond comprehension watching Bush and President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, talking about things which don't belong to this celebration.
Do you think if on 4th of July Mister Putin will come to US and start talking politic, how unfair history was done to natives in this country, how does this would sound? Would it sound supportive of national celebration?
WW2 was not won by Americans. They did not fight on their territory, what year Americans join the rest of the world? Americans were fighting in Pacific, not in Europe, not in Russia. They join others in Berlin and dump the nuke on Japan.
So, please, Mister Lucas, look at that rate poor population and not so poor population reproduce itself here, in America. In Russia people have 1-2 children, in America the number is around 3. Think about it. Every country thinking about future want their citizins to produce offspring. What is wrong with that?
What is wrong with cotton undergarments? American environmentalists seems to enjoy it too.
America is constantly talking about forbidding abortion. This is true democracy on AMERICA's part. Especially in regard to women's rights.
You book belong to humour section (if the facts were not as screwd as you present them), the masses don't need it.

The author describes step by step how freedom was curtailed. How Russia is moving backward. How they have in the end not looked to the West but to their Soviet and Tsarist past for a model. How the Kremlin has created a system of "authoritarian bureaucratic capitalism" in which economic stability is valued more than freedom. Mr. Lucas then describes the new threat from Russia. They are using their, new weapon, billions and billions of dollars from vast natural resources to attack our weakness: money.
But the Edward Lucas does not leave us hanging. He outlines a winning foreign policy. The US and EU must unite to win this new war by securing supplies of gas and breaking Russia's growing monopoly and we must stand behind small ex-Soviet states like such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia.
If we don't we will lose the New Cold War and a new Soviet Union could well be resurrected. And voters this November, beware, this Kremlin has endorsed Mr. Obama for President.

This book is better than your average world politics reader in the scope of material it covers. Each chapter is preceded by some comments from Mingst and Snyder which makes the text easier to follow for those learning about IR for the first time. Additionally, they cover a broad range of perspectives including those of a classical realist, neo-realist, liberalist, dependency theorist, feminist, Marxist, and more. I was especially impressed by the thoughtful inclusion of feminist articles in key chapters, and the unconventionality of including articles from Foreign Policy and The Economist. Some of the excerpts seem arbitrarily shortened or cut off (probably due to space constraints) and therefore I feel some crucial information was addressed too briefly (and in a couple cases not at all). However, this is a good introductory reader if one is interested in International Relations, World Politics, and the International Political Economy.

When I heard that Morley had co-authored a new book I wondered what he was up to. I was part of the reinventing government team that Morley headed and respect him for his political insight and as a decent human being.

The book is a mile stone that shows where we are now. where we came from and where we are going. Not to often do you find a book on society and politics that is as informative and easy to read.

The the final chapters Rebuilding America's Civic Infrastructure and
Public Policy in a Millennial Era are jnspiring and are a great addition to public dialog. The comparison to our time and 1860 and 1932 is on the mark.

Now living in northern Arizona after 47 years in the DC area I can see a factor that I could not find in the book the relationship with the rapidly expanding world of nonprofits partcularly in the area of natural resource sustainability

Just as newspapers have shifted their primary emphasis from print to the Internet, so too has politics. The bottom-up dynamic, emblemized by user-generated content, is taking over in many spheres, and those who cling to old authoritarian top-down structures will become irrelevant.

There's more power in a user-generated video on youtube, produced at almost zero cost and gone viral, than in any traditional prepackaged million dollar TV ad campaign. Indeed, often the packaged claims are mercilessly pulled apart to great detriment to their makers by online hordes (witness Hillary's "3 AM" ad, or her claims of sniper fire) - and increasingly, the online hordes are the ones who are having the final word. (This also raises the specter of the digital divide, where only the plugged-in will recognize and understand the various waves of public opinion.)

A great move of democratization is well under way, and its pace is almost frightening. Print media can't keep up with the new newsflow. Even online news sites that do not encourage reader interactivity will wither. (These Amazon reviews were a trailblazer in creating the new interactive environment.)

This book argues two main points: that the upcoming generation has more in common with Democratic Party ideals than Republican, and that on top of that the Republicans have been late to recognize the seismic generationally- and technologically-driven shift beneath our feet.

This book will by no means be the final word on the subject. Both authors are committed Democrats, and though they strive to write without bias, it's a sure bet their theses will be answered by those on the other side of the fence. In the answering will develop a more circumspect, accurate picture - in a process mimicking the online refinement of opinion that the authors write about. Nonetheless this work lays an important foundation that the politically- and civic-minded of all persuasions would do very well to digest.

Unlike most books, this one more than lives up to the hype on its jacket. Morley Winograd and Michael Hais go well beyond generational theory to help us understand not only past critical turning points in American history, but also the crucial one we're about to live through.

This is not the political punditry of "talking heads" who merely spout trendy theories without analytical substance. Rather, it is a well researched and well written review of the factors that have helped shape the Millennial Generation (1983-2003) now coming of age, together with some insightful commentary on the impact this generation is likely to have on our country and our world. In its pages the authors present both the "whys" and the "hows" in a well organized and easy-to-read discourse.

"Millennial Makeover" is not just for political junkies. If you are a concerned citizen trying to wade through the political and social cross-currents of our country, particularly in this important presidential election year, you should read this book. It left this aging Baby Boomer surprised, enlightened, fearful, smiling and cautiously optimistic about our future.

"A republic, if you can keep it." That's what Benjamin Franklin reportedly said when asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention what type of government the Framers had fashioned. "Millennial Makeover" offers a fascinating look at how this emerging tech-savvy "civic" generation might do just that.

Winograd and Hais theorize that American political constituencies cycle and recycle every 40-years with each cycle fueled by new technologies that empower new constituencies. Ostensibly, the millennial "civic purpose" generation, by some astrological virtue, is poised to assume a mantle of power. If the authors are correct, then the Greatest Generation was great because of its place in a 40-year cycle and not because of the harsh reality of having to fight Adolph Hitler or die.

To support their theory, the authors would have us believe that "long periods of great stability in electoral outcomes" can be deduced from a pattern like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush (D, R, D, D, R, R, D, R, R, D, R).

Often, in place of real historical events, the authors cite contemporary fiction -- video philosophy from Star Wars' Yoda or fictional facts from J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" that match their worldview. Potter may demonstrate fictional millennial virtues, but the authors avoid Dolores Umbrage, the teacher whose politically correct teaching ignores actual useful defenses against the dark arts. A champion of central authority, as the authors suggest millennials are, she and the Ministry of Magic avoid at all costs facing the "reality" of evil. Life seems so much easier when history begins at dawn.

The authors presume that Democrats alone can pull this generation's technological sword from the stone. Never mind that technology is a tool for whoever cares to learn enough to use it -- not just Democrats or Republicans, but fundamentalists, radicals, and reactionaries of all persuasions. The authors overlook the 60-year-old ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who warned of the importance of a medium's cognitive effects. Lose your content and you lose your bearings.

The book promotes now-ness, technological infatuation, and me-ness to suggest millennials deserve power because they are who they are -- which makes them ripe for picking by any chameleon-like leader. Look elsewhere for help understanding the past or planning a future because this book is a honey-pot of buzzwords for the convinced.

"Millennial Makeover" presents a very interesting but not wholly convincing analysis of how politics may be shaped by the rise of the Millennials, or those born between 1982 and 2003. Relying far too much on a questionable cyclical reading of American history, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais nonetheless demonstrate how the Millennial's embrace of new cultural attitudes and technologies will impact the political dialogue for decades to come. While the author's selective presentation of data tends to prompt far more questions than answers, the book succeeds in providing an interesting introduction to a subject that no doubt will be discussed and debated now and well into the future.

Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais contend that American politics cycle through change about every forty years and experience a profound realignment about once every eighty years. The authors believe that these changes are typically spurred by the ideological exhaustion of prior generations and the introduction of new technologies that enable new political constituencies to form. In my view, this is problematic: critics such as David R Mayhew have pointed out that cyclical theorists are more often wrong than right; worse, as a theoretical construct, the methodology tends to close off lines of inquiry into the underlying reasons why voter preferences may be realigning, such as changes in economic or social conditions of the kind that one might suspect may be operative at the present time.

Fortunately, Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais serve up plenty of raw meat and provide insight into the Millennials that might help us form our own opinions about what the future might hold. The authors explain how blogging and peer-to-peer technologies are empowering "netroots" activism and providing alternatives to broadcast media; they go on to argue that political parties must shift from prevailing money-and-media models to decentralized organizational structures. We are shown some interesting case studies where individuals have used YouTube and MySpace to win local contests against great odds and upset the conventional wisdom. These sections of the book succeed brilliantly as they draw upon the author's decades of experience in the political arena to shed new light on how profoundly the process is changing and how American democracy might be reinvigorated.

Yet somehow, the light that Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais shines on the Millennial generation itself appears to be diffused. For example, one must wonder if the large numbers of Millennials who currently suffer from deficient healthcare and educational services might be represented disproportionately among those who favor greater government spending; might not this constitute a cry of desperation rather than one of enlightened civility, as the authors of this book seem to suggest? Unfortunately, the author's insistence on rolling up the Millennials into a single, undifferentiated mass makes it impossible for us to know. On this point, readers might do well to consider The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein who presents the Millennials as a generation whose critical thinking skills have been stupefied by an unprecedented abundance of mind-distracting media and technological gadgetry; contrary to Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais, Mr. Bauerlein demonstrates that the Millennials possess a diminished knowledge of civics compared to prior generations and worse, generally lack the cognitive skills needed to distinguish between true and false claims of information.

Compounding the problem is that the authors seem determined to write a palliative for the Democratic Party faithful that proposes to show how its policy positions will align neatly with Millennial concerns. Although a reasonable person might well agree with the authors on the wisdom of their proposals, is it not also quite plausible that a repackaging of Republican Party-style 'ownership society' proposals might serve as a marketable (if not credible) response to our current social, economic and environmental crises? Indeed, the survey data presented about the Millennial's overly optimistic material expectations suggests that this generation has been conditioned by unprecedented levels of corporate messaging; presumably this could make Millennials susceptible to corporate greenwashing campaigns, corporate welfare state solutions, and the like. Indeed, to the extent that the Obama and McCain campaigns have championed national health care policies that feature prominent roles for private insurance companies, we may well be witnessing a realignment of voter preferences that merely determines the methods by which the corporate control of our democracy is intensified. Put another way, the evidence presented suggests that the pending realignment, if it materializes, will be political but far from radical.

In any case, the authors are to be congratulated for writing a stimulating book that helps us consider how major changes might well be in the offing. I recommend the book for everyone interested in political science and contemporary events.

This book is not very thick and when I took my history class I learned that the professor chose this book because the class was going to be based on allot of lecture and note taking. If you take a history class and they require this book, hope for the best that you get an easy teacher but really be prepared for allot of lecture and note taking.

It was shipped out fast because I needed it for my history class. It is not my subject at all, but I liked it. I have it for sale to sent out PRIORITY MAIL!! At no extra charge look it up and buy!!

I finished this book, considering I hate reading and haven't read a book since high school, that should mean something. I'm not a fan of people shoving their opinions down my throat, but I picked this book up out of curiosity. And I had a feeling the author and I would agree on more things than disagree.

I really do place most of the blame of this countries problems, fear, irrational paranoia, and emphasis that we are all alone and need to depend on the government for protection on the media- the news programs specifically. They chose what to report on, they chose what slant to bring to the story, they leave out details, and hardly ever report on the honesty, humanity, and morality of man.

This book just confirmed what I already believed. Although it was refreshing to know that I'm not the only one that finds the media destructive. He touches on good points. Even things I wasn't scared of, but the American public may be concerned about. Some of his statements, seem to be unfounded and he could have backed them up more with facts. He can sometimes assume facts because of his personal beliefs. But overall the book was good. I don't feel the need to read it more than once though.

This book is great for the social and cultural notions of the last 20th and early 21st century. It speaks to an important and growing discourse of critiquing the media.

Some things haven't changed in the last ten years since this book was written. I do believe that the media has gotten worse over the years since this book was written. After reading this book, I am about ready to boycott the newspaper/TV medias but ... they still do provide a service to the public, so I can't just write them completely off yet. But this book has made that idea a temptation.

I orginally gave this book a four star but upon further reflection, I had to give it a three-star rating. I do believe it was well-written, researched as thoroughly as possible, but there's a taint of bias in his studies, or at least in the first half of the book. He mentioned his anti-guns bias repeatedly and after the third time of reading about it, I want to say, ok, I get your point. That bias left a shadow over the entire first half of the book that it made me weary of his points before I even finished the book. The bias would have been better if it was left alone after the first time he mentioned it.

Other than that, he validated his points with examples after examples throughout the entire book. The reader doesn't necessarily have to agree with his reasonings, but he does make good points about how the media ignores the facts and runs away with the scare tactics. After reading "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over For Bush" and this book, I am even more inclined to think less of the media. There is a point that someone who works in the media said that rings true even back to my newsroom days: "News is what happens to your editors." (page 201)

But that doesn't excuse reporters and editors from creating scare tactics or sensational news to frighten people. Yes, sensational news sell copies, and it does seem that the media has forgotten their responsibility to the people as a whole, which is to provide unbiased reporting of facts and news to the public. I know that it is almost impossible to keep your own opinions out of it (which is why they have columnists), but to constantly provide news that frighten Americans without checking all the facts of the story, is in my opinion, just wrong.

This book is a must-read for aspiring journalists or for anyone who wants to be in the know. It is detailed and insightful. It will disgust the reader in spots and provide more information in other spots. It is not an entertaining book but one that will provide thoughtful musings on the state of the media these days. Some things just haven't changed in the last 10 years.

7/9/08

The vast majority of fears in The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things are irrational. People who are deathly afraid of plain crashes are probably a bit paranoid, considering their rarity. People who are very afraid of black men are probably racist, considering how much more common it is for black men to be victims than perps. The biggest new insight I received from Glassner's work was on Gulf War Syndrome. Glassner, a Sociology Professor at USC, convincingly demonstrates that improbability that GWS is the result of exposure to chemical weapons or any other destructive war technology. I will not delve into the specific reasons for GWS, but it is a common thread for a certain percentage of veterans in all modern wars.

Chapters on teen motherhood, AIDS, violent youth and homicidal mothers manage to be dull, despite public fascination (my own included) with such topics, covered ad nauseum in the media. The best part of the book is the cover, which is well done with the inventive title prominently featured. What should have been an excellent concept turns into a rehashing of known contradictions to common stereotypes. There must be dozens of people who could do this better, including the authors of Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

I got to thinking about people who pay to have their dogs on doggy Prozac...Or whatever it's called...They must have a FEAR that their dog is mentally ill I guess..Anyways...This is a really good book..I would put it in the "media watchdog" category...It's even better post 9/11....Tons of examples of fears..How they are created...By which so called "experts"...The real facts are then presented...Hey look..It's young black males that DIE the most...Not the ones you should FEAR about getting killed BY....You will never watch Dateline NBC the same again after reading this book....Isolated incidents made out to be sweeping epidemics.....I think the culture of fear is here to stay...read this book and learn how it works.

Got this one for my husband. He loved it! Couldn't put it down.

Bought this as a gift - skimmed through it before wrapping. Not as witty as I thought it might be. If you want day-by-day accounts of Reagan's administration, this is the book for you.

If you don't like being spoonfed only what your professors and the media want you to hear, you should read books like this. Reagan made a comment or two about each day before bed and this book puts you right into his shoes. You'll get a sense of what it's like to be the President, how human the making of history really is when it happens and the strong, determined mindset of one of the 20th century's greatest leaders.

Wonderful.

What a fantastic book; written by President Reagan at the time history was being made. They say hindsight is 20 20 but it's astonishing how spot on he was with his comments, made without the benefit of looking back.
It's very enlightening to see what his thoughts were as history was being made and even the mundane or trivial things take on greater meaning when judged by the context of the present day.
Reagan kept pretty good notes and they're all here. In addition, there are quite a few color photos to put faces to the various people he talks about.
If you are interested in presidential history and in his motives i highly recommend this book!

I gave this book to my aunt who is 89 years young. She reports back to me that she loved it. She read it in 3 days.

I used this book for a comparative politics class. The book dedicates a chapter on each of several nations (France, Nigeria, UK, USA, Pakistan, and others). Easy to read and interesting.

I am an enthusiastic amateur family historian and I have puzzled a while over an important (to my wife and I) family question: how come my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole (1888 - 1917), of Lidgate, Suffolk, and of the 5th Battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, was killed by the Turks at Gaza?

Subsidiary questions have also been in my mind: why were the Turks/Ottomans our enemies in the so-called 'Great War'?; what determined the demise of the Turkish/Ottoman Empire, under which many races, including Jews, Arabs and Turks, had lived relatively peaceably?; and how did the present-day 'Middle East' become such a problem area?

I am also a member of the 'what if' school of history: this book is one of those that inspire endless speculation. If decisions had been made differently and events had taken a different course, maybe my wife's great uncle's descendants could still be living at Lidgate.

For example, what if the British Cabinet had acted on Winston Churchill's urging in 1911 to make an alliance with the Turks/Ottomans?

And if the 'Great War' had gone on for two years only (the German General Ludendorff believed the entry of the Turks/Ottomans into the war allowed the outnumbered Central powers to fight on for two years longer than they would have been able on their own), my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.

And if Winston Churchill's Dardanelles plans had prevailed over those of Lord Kitchener in March, 1915, Constantinople would have fallen, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.

As it was, it appears that numerous attempts were made to subvert, to attack, and to conquer the Turks/Ottomans, the defeat of whom could - and, maybe, should - have been accomplished in 1915, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.

This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through - has provided me with much information and most of the answers and I am so grateful to David Fromkin for researching and writing it and to Amazon for selling it to me.

It is quite clear to me now that the alliance between Germany and the Turks/Ottomans was at best an unintended mistake and at worst the secret design of a very few of the Turkish leaders. It could have been done very differently, with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire continuing to maintain their neutrality, to the benefit of the British and of the world.

And it also appears from Fromkin's account that the successive collapses of the British, French and Russian Governments were directly attributable to the Dardanelles disaster. In the case of Russia, of course, this meant a fatal finale for the Czar and his family and the rise of Lenin and Bolshevism.

There came on the scene in 1917 one Woodrow Wilson, as ignorant regarding Britain, France, Russia and the Turkish/Ottoman Empire as many Americans, but as determined, nevertheless, to do down the British as his later successor, Franklin Roosevelt. Despite having some high-flown thoughts, Mr Wilson helped little.

All in all, it is once again amazing to me that two great British statesmen, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, should have been so full of foresight and wisdom. It's all too obvious that the others, including Wilson, were political pygmies.

I suppose now and with hindsight that I would probably have preferred for the Ottoman Empire to have been maintained, as Churchill often wanted, or, failing that, for the British Empire to have been vastly extended - for good!

I spotted one error (on page 299, in a section on the role of Louis D. Brandeis, later the first Jewish member of the United States Supreme Court): 'Only one Jew [Oscar Strauss] had ever been a member of the president's cabinet.' Not true: Judah Philip Benjamin played prominent roles in the cabinet of President Jefferson Davis.

(An extremely interesting piece of information gleaned from the book is that Baghdad and Jerusalem, before the War, were home to the largest populations of Jews in the Middle East. 'Jews in large numbers had lived in the Mesopotamian provinces since the time of the Babylonian captivity - about 600 BC - and thus were settled in the country a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs in AD 634.').

There has been some criticism that this book is too much about Great Britain and its leaders and people. To answer the criticism I quote the following (from page 385): 'The Prime Minister (Lloyd George) claimed that Britain was entitled to play the dominant role in the Middle East, recalling that at one time or another two and a half million British troops had been sent there, and that a quarter of a million had been killed or wounded; while the French, Gallipoli apart, had suffered practically no casualties in the Middle East, and the Americans had not been there at all.'

Thoroughly recommended: I couldn't put it down!

A personal post-script:

In the Autumn of 1917, following two earlier failed attempts by General Murray in the first half of that year, General Allenby invaded (from Egypt, which was under British protection) Palestine, and my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole, was killed, during the third battle of Gaza, on the 3rd of November (reportedly fatally injured by a Turk soldier and then shot by a fellow British officer, in the presence of his own younger brother, to put him out of his misery, there being no chance that he would live), and lies buried at the Deir El Belah War Cemetery. And the Middle East is still a problem.

Well-researched and it reads like a novel. 565 pages flew by before I noticed I was making progress. And timely as all get-out. What more could you posssibly want for the price of five gallons of Middle Eastern gas?

This is an absolutely first-rate history book: it covers the complexity without simplification, yet tells a riveting story with a huge cast of larger than life characters (Churchill, Ataturk, Lenin, Lawrence of Arabia, and many others). It is also superlatively written.

The book begins with the machinations leading up to the Great War. The Ottoman Empire - in decline for over 300 years, yet a useful "buffer" for the Western powers against the Russian Empire in the "Great Game" - is finally coming apart with the rise of the western-minded "young Turks." That means that it is finally collapsing and Britain and France must decide whether to continue to prop up its vast territorial holdings or to nakedly seek to carve up its territories for the benefit of their own empires. France coveted Syria and Lebanon, GB the rest. In the end, it is what they got.

Once the Great War began, however, the Turks allied themselves with the Germans, for which CHurchill was unjustly blamed (he confiscated two destroyers that Britain's shipyards had just manufactured for the Turks). This led directly to the catastrophically mismanaged invasion of the Dardanelles, in a bid to end the War by pushing a wedge into the Germanic coalition from the South, again Churchill's idea. (Amazingly, the collapse of Bulgaria was what finally ended WWI 4 years later, as the allies entered the gap). As the Turks rallied, the allies turned to making alliances with the Arabs and others under loose Turkish suzerainty.

The greatest accomplishment of the book is to dissect the mentality of British policymakers, which by today's standards was almost ghoulishly primitive. First, they had a 19C colonialist bias, which meant that they were by nature destined to rule the "brown" races, from India to Arabia, for their own good. WHile there was much strategic calculation, such as guarding the Suez canal for freighter traffic, it was principally to maintain the glory of the British Empire as conceived under Queen Victoria. Second, they utterly lacked basic knowledge of not just the Turks, but also the Arabs and Zionists. For example, beyond sensationalist and romantic travel literature, the only available source to understand the Turk was a history written in the 18C! Few of the aristocratic elite spoke any of the languages and most were openly racist and anti-semitic. Third, there were conspiracy theories that would appear absolutely lunatic today (to paraphrase Fromkin). Thus, there were top policymakers who actually believed that Jews controlled not just the young Turks, but also the emerging Bolshievics and even the German Kaiser's inner circle!

This ignorance and arrogant disregard for other points of view would be laughable were they not responsible for the decisions that set up the system of shakey nation states we see today in the Middle East. To cultivate the non-existent Jewish cabal, the Brits came up with the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the validity of a zionist state. (Interestingly, like many fundamentalists today, this support gained indispensable credence because a state of Jews in Palestine was a Biblical prerequisite for Armageddon and the assumed ascension of Christians to paradise.) In addition, the Brits designated several families, including the Hashemites - Aristocrats chosen first by the Turks and educated in the Harem of the Sublime Port - as a way to gain control over all Arabs tribes as they believed they would obey the dictates of the highest religious authority. Once the Brits chose these people, they were stuck with them, which was how the new states eventually were established.

As the War came to an end, GB and France - now distrustful of eachothers' imperial ambitions to the point that they almost went to war! - were unable to devote attention and resources to nationbuilding, though this did not stop them from setting up what were supposed to become modern states in places that knew neither secular politics nor any sense of national purpose. They just installed people they hoped they could trust (read "control"), which explains who became leaders of what petty kingdoms at that time. Many, though not all of them are still there and almost completely lack political legitimacy over vast territories that were governed by independent tribes under a loose Turkish confederation. It is no wonder that these artificial constructs are so unstable, mixing peoples with modern weaponry and infrastructure who for centuries were isolated and divided by religion, ethnicity, and power politics. The new leaders and their subjects had little idea how to wield the tools of the modern state, while nascent nationalisms were undermining the western empires.

This is the story of the greatest watershed of the 20C: sowing the seeds of the end of western domination as the impulse grew in colonial peoples to govern themselves. Not only did Turkey reinvent itself, but the Soviet Union was born, and the western powers (with the exception of the US) had squandered their human and financial resources catastrophically. Amazingly, what was going on in the Middle East at that time was seen as a backwater sideshow: virtually no one recognized the magnitude of change that was unleashed.

If there is any failing of the book, it is its less diligent effort to penetrate the minds of the Arabs and Turks. The author brilliantly delineates the moribund reasoning from within the 19C western empires, but does not explain what the powerful indigenous peoples were thinking and feeling.

Warmly recommended. This is one of the best history books I have read in years.

World War One brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine (including a somewhat conditional Jewish Homeland), and the Transjordan were carved out mainly by the British. Turkey established itself as a separate entity including both European (East Thrace) and Asian parts. David Fromkin leads the reader through the changes that occurred between 1914 and 1922 in meticulous detail. Indeed, this reader found the book's main shortcoming to be the welter of specific facts that sometimes obscured the larger picture.

Fromkin's book was published in 1989 so that it has an interesting historical perspective. The Iranians had thrown out the Americans and the so-called Afghan Arabs had played their (exaggerated) role in pushing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, but 9-11 remained over a decade in the future. Nonetheless, Fromkin detected the strength of Islam as the most important force in the region.

Fromkin notes that the Middle East was the final area of the world to fall to Western (mostly British) imperialism. He also observes that this extension of Western power had long been anticipated with the main question being which country would get how much. In the end the British obtained more paper power than they could reasonable have hoped for, but then they found that by 1922 they had neither the will nor the wherewithal to exert that power. The Great War drained them of both. The British, and to a lesser degree the French and Americans, created weak countries and left major issues such as the fate of Kurds, Jews, and Palestinian Arabs unresolved.

An even more fundamental challenge remained and remains. In every other area of the globe subjected to Western dominance, Western forms and principles prevailed, but Fromkin notes that "at least one of those assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants...have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all life, including government and politics." Fromkin puts his finger right on the problem that the West has in understanding much of the region.

Even more daunting, Fromkin argues that the Middle East still has not sorted itself out after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He notes discouragingly that it took Western Europe about more than a millennium to "resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity". The region's politics lack any "sense of legitimacy" or "agreement on the rules of the game - and no belief, universally shared in the region...that the entities that call themselves countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such." The last such rulers were the Ottoman sultans.

With regard to the current troubles in Iraq, one fervently wishes that someone in Washington had appreciated the penetrating analysis by the British civil commissioner Arnold Wilson in 1920 about the area just then being called Iraq. While he was called upon to administer the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, he did not believe they "formed a coherent entity". As he saw it the Kurds of Mosul would never accept an Arab leader, while the Shi'ite Moslems would never accept domination by the minority Sunnis, but, to directly quote Wilson, "no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination." And on and on it goes.

The book features a number of familiar figures, Winston Churchill most prominent among them. Fromkin's favorable treatment of Churchill strongly suggests that Winston was repeatedly ill-served by subordinates, bad luck, and bad press. By 1922, Churchill was finished as a British politician (or so it seemed). Other major figures include Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George, T.E. Lawrence (about whom many questions are raised). A plethora of lesser known British and French military and civil leaders abound in the pages of Fromkin's lengthy tome, not to mention the odd Russia and German. Turkish leaders, such as Enver Pasha and Mustapha Kemal often bewilder their Western counterparts.

Perhaps the oddest historical artifact reproduced by Fromkin was the belief, generally accepted among British intelligence and high-ranking civil and military leaders, in a conspiracy between Prussian generals and Jewish financiers manipulating Russian Bolsheviks and Turkish nationalists to the detriment of British interests! Moreover, in this conspiratorial view, Islam was controlled by Jewry. At this point, the reader is tempted to quietly murmur that the British should go home where they might understand something of what they are about. (The dangers of drawing too direct lessons from history are great and while the US leadership did not harbor any notions quite this crackpot, it bears notice that the US seem not to have understand Iraq, its history, or its people before sending in troops.)

Fromkin produced a fine book, not an easy read, with a wealth of information and an excellent closing summary. It suffered, at times from the size of the subject - the transformation of an entire region during a worldwide war - and the maze of characters and details. A book that bears a second reading and a subject (subjects, really) for further study. Highly recommended.

Fromkin's seminal work is now almost 20 years old, and it is still the essential history book on the bungled making of the modern Middle East. Like another reviewer, I would gladly have given this a 6-star rating if it were possible. So much today remains the very same, save for the change from one imperial power to another. Consider from the Introduction: "The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today." On page 451 Fromkin quotes the caution of an American missionary to the woman who, by in large, created Iraq, Gertrude Bell: "You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity..... they have no conception of nationhood yet."

From the perspective of a century, in some ways it is difficult to believe that all this was a sideshow, to use William Shawcross's phrase for Cambodia. The "real drama" was the Western Front, a subsidiary drama the Eastern Front, and the rise of Communism, and this very distant front was much like Burma during the Second War World, few players with meager resources.

Fromkin lays much of the blame for the misunderstandings between the West and the Middle East on Kitchener. In a description true of individuals today, he said of Kitchener: "The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants...... and his choice of Arab politicians...."

His chapter on the Balfour Declaration is strong; balancing the forces and players at work, and making the oft-forgotten point that the vast majority of the world's Jew's were not Zionists. The book is replete with other ironies, such as a footnoted exchange:"... on the Arab question, shows Lord Kitchener asking, "Wahabism, does that still exist?" and Sykes answering, "I think it is a dying fire." So much of the West's impression of Saudi Arabia was initially formed by TE Lawrence, in his half-fictional work "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" so Fromkin's confirmation that Lawrence himself cautioned his biographer, Graves, that his work is "...full of half-truth here." is a valuable reminder to examine the prism and motives of individuals who write about the Middle East.

On page 468, again with an easy substitution, plus ca change.... "In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule."

I agree with some of the criticism of this book: that it is a "big man's" version of history, and neglects describing broader social forces that motivate the "little man" and that it is weak on describing the thinking and motivation of the non-European regional players.

We can only hope that additional parallels with the present situation will occur, from page 561: "By the time that the war came to an end (WW I), British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be a benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue. Viewing imperialism as a costly drain on a society that needed to invest all of its remaining resources in rebuilding itself...."

This book should be mandatory reading for the next American administration.

This collection of essays on life under Communism in Eastern Europe provides a unique perspective on the failure of the Communist system. Particularly memorable anecdotes include the author's misgivings over buying her daughter a Barbie doll and the actions and behaviors which became commonplace in a society in which (and this is emphasized) everyone lived in moderate to extreme poverty.
It is extremely difficult to find any personal narratives concerning Communism which are more or less politically unbiased. The author of this work seems to hold a sort of nOSTalgia for the days under Communism as a time of equality, even though this equality set the standards of living extremely low. The perspective of which this book comes from seems to be predominantly a feminist, as opposed to left or right wing, perspective, making for an enlightening read.
The bare bones downfalls of Communism are extrapolated and explored with an eye and mind which rarely condemns Communism, but rather identifies problems with an air of disappointment. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of tampons or alternatives, demonstrating the government's inability to deal with even the most basic needs of the female population.
I recommend this book as a valuable primary source for the study of the Eastern Bloc, the disinitigration of the European Communist regimes, and for a feminist perspective on some of the most glaring political issues of the 20th century.

I would have given this book three and a half stars if I had the option; but I don't, so I am giving it four, all on account of its good narrative and occasional wit.
I keep hearing and reading about what an "eye-opener" this book has been for readers in Western countries. That is all well and fine; many of the things she describes are valid information.
The problem is that this book, by empathizing (and rightly so) with the everday noodle-and-darning plight of "sisters" in other so-called Communist regimes (all of whom had a MUCH harder time than we in the former Yugoslavia ever did) tends to blur not only the HUGE political and social nuances and distinctions among the various "Communist" countries, but also inside ex-Yugoslavia itself. In short, the so-called Communist "block" was never really a "block" - it was a tapestry of many nuances and textures, depending on the country.

Admittedly, I belong to a different generation than Ms. Drakuliæ. Furthermore, I was born and grew up in the northern part of the country, called Slovenia (now, an independent state), which was, incidentally, the "richest" part of Yugoslavia. (And BTW: I don't recall any of her interlocutors in the book being a Slovene... Why not? Maybe because the situation in Slovenia wouldn't fit in with the utterly dismal picture that she is painting?)
Here are some facts: often, there were (usually short-term) shortages of different things: sugar, bananas, chocolate, detergent... I even remember a shortage of toilet paper, once. But never all at the same time, and never for very long. We never queued, like the unfortunate peoples of the Soviet satellite states. I for one DID have dolls, very pretty ones (no, NOT rag dolls) - 18 of them! If there ever was a shortage of tampons (I never use them), I certainly don't remember any shortage of sanitary towels. We were always nicely dressed and made-up; and if the clothes on offer in our own country didn't suit us, we'd make a 2 hour trip to nearby Italy, where we could buy more trendy attire. (Nobody in my family ever did that, BTW.)

No, I am not one of those short-memoried "nostalgics" who mourn the demise of the Titoist regime and the fallacy of the infamous "unity & fraternity" slogans of those days... In fact, I did every thing that I could to help erode it and bring it down.
I just resent history - ANY history - being "tailored" to suit the prefabricated expectations of foreign readers.

Had Ms. Drakuliæ decided to include a "girl talk" with a Slovene or two - who were even her "compatriots" in those times, after all - a picture slightly more complex would emerge. And maybe then people elsewhere wouldn't have been surprised by the news that Yugoslavia was falling apart... It already WAS - always had been - several different countries within one artificial structure.

In short: enjoy this book, for it tells the truth - and it tells it well! Just not the ENTIRE truth.

I will read this eye-opening book again and again. Historical accounts of communism can't paint the picture that this book has painted. This reads like poetry and is real.

I have read Drakulic's later book Balken Express, and thought this book far better. Drakulic's book is a series of essays about the difficulty of life in Eastern Europe from a woman's perspective. Communism collasped because it could not satisfy the demands of the population. Drakulic details many of those shortcomings in her book. Not only did Communism produce poor paint and bad toilet paper, it did not even produce tampons or other products for women. That is why Communism failed. Few history books will detail this perspective, but from a humanistic point of view, it is true.
The other perspective Drakulic tries to point out is that of a journalist pointing to the failures of both Communist and Western society. Drakulic portrays the homeless of NYC with the fact that in Communist society everybody is poor but not homeless. These perspectives are needed as well, because some aspects of Communism were indeed noble.
A good book about the failure of Communism. This book was a short informative read about a doomed political system.

A fascinating collection of poignant vignettes on being a woman in communist Yugoslavia (with stories of the author's friends and acquaintances in other Eastern European countries.) Ms. Drakulic shares with the West the reasons whereby 40-plus years of communist-engendered habits and viewpoints and tendencies cannot undergo an overnight "attitude adjustment". This book is a must for anyone who seeks to begin to sympathize and understand the thoughts and roots of people (especially women) who were born and raised in Eastern Europe. I bulldozed through it, and am now reading her "Cafe Europa". Eye-opening!