Politics Government Books

When the title of a book has an embarrassing grammatical mistake, you know you shouldn't even buy it. Really lame mistake.

As much as I appreciate the intent of their book, social workers have no place in the political process -- and, other than as citizens, they shouldn't. Social work is not a profession. Social workers have sold their souls to becomes second-rate psychotherapists. Their advocacy days are long over. Schools of social work pay lip service to social justice issues (in fact, social work organizations have not been able to define the word "justice," much to their collective embarrassment. Social workers should just get back to case management and leave the other work they attempt to lawyers, policy analysts, and well-educated psychologists. (Of course, I'm a Columbia U. Schl. of Social Wk. grad, the most unjust school imaginable, so I'm knowledgeable and bitter)

I want to hear others' opinions . . . e-mail at "thankavet@angelfire.com"

Reading through the other reviews here it struck me that they seemed to share a lack of prior knowledge about the subject. Had anyone read more widely they would have discovered that 'Children at War' is a piece of pseudo-scholarship. This book is based upon a completely misguided assumption - that the involvement of children in warfare is a new phenomenon. In making such an assertion the author reveals either lack of any proper engagement with the literature or simply bad faith. The sad fact is that children have been involved as solidiers in many, if not most, of the wars recorded in history. In spite of Singer's erroneous claims to the contrary, the US Civil War involved large numbers of boy soldiers. Similarly the First World War. Children fought and died with the partisans in Nazi-occupied Europe, and so on. Towards the end of the book, Singer reveals a disturbing political agenda. It seems that his real concern is less with child soldiers and more with the challenges for US troops faced with children in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where killing them is bad for morale and also looks so bad to the folks back home watching CNN.
In terms of sources, Singer relies overwhelmingly on journalistic accounts that are simply intended to offer shock value to their readers and, like his own book, lack any deeper engagement with the history and context within which child recruitment takes place. Aside from one quote, none of the copious quotes from child soldiers seems to have come from Singer's one fieldwork. Indeed, the reader is left wondering if Singer has ever actually visited a setting where child recruitment takes place.
This is a work of truly poor scholarship. It is a mystery how it ever got published and why so many people have been apparently taken in by it. Perhaps it is a case of telling people what they want to hear?
If anyone is looking for a proper discussion of this subject they would do far better to read David Rosen's 'Armies of the Young'.

Being an International Relations student about to embark on a years study on this subject I was looking for a solid grounding on which to begin my study and this provided a perfect answer. Singer uses simple dialogue and logical progression in his publication to provide information on the recruting of child soldiers, what they are subjected to in the field, the difficulty of soldiers facing children, the worst culprits, reintegration of soldiers and proposed methods of ending this aspect of modern warfare.

An important aspect of this book that isn't mentioned so much is its discussions on how military forces should approach fighting child soldiers. As a potential officer of the future I felt this was particularly important, Singer mentions that the US Army supplied early drafts of this book to its officers as guidelines for potential situations so clearly they believe his suggestions hold merit also.

It should be noted that any reader should of course expect some horrific details from this book, I had expected these but was sickened by some of the stories. There are particularly brutal aspects that you could not imagine, just a word of warning as one of the accounts has left me particularly troubled by hummanity.

In conclusion I believe this book to be a perfect introductory reading to anyone studying, or simply interested, in the subject. I would also state that those more advanced in the topic should look at this book as, if the information and proposals are not new to you, the research is excellent and so the references can provide you with more resources that you may potentially have not yet accessed.

Altogether a superb book, ideal for anyone wishing to gain further knowledge in the subject area.

Back in the mid-1990s I spent many months reporting on child soldiers in places including Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I wrote from the immediacy of a journalist's perspective, but was unable to examine the cause-and-effect realities of this disturbing phenomenon. In "Children at War" P. W. Singer has produced a truly important study of the socio-cultural, economic and historic causes behind the militarization of children in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Singer's work is an incredibly valuable contribution to further the study and understanding of armed conflict in the post Cold War-era. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the welfare of children and the state of our world in often-neglected locations such as sub-Saharan Africa. It is also an insightful look at how "warlordism" and the greed driving so-called commodity wars is changing the face of modern armed conflict.

No one should think themselves well-informed about contemporary international conflict unless they are aware of the child soldier problem. I commend Singer for Children at War; it seems to cover most of the material that one might hope it would, and it does so with clarity and precision. The book is not marred by opinion or bias (I believe some decry this approach, but this is a work of academic non-fiction); it simply presents the facts on topics that range from recruitment of child soldiers to strategies that should be utilized by conventional militaries when they must engage belligerent groups that incorporate child soldiers.

Despite my three-star rating, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for an informed and well-rounded look at child warfare. Singer's writing style is easy to read in that it uses simple language and is clearly meant to be accessible; however, (and this is the reason for the three stars) he can be quite repetitive. Although one could argue that the information in this book should be drilled into everyone's heads, reading the same sentence many times over, only with slightly different wording, can be cumbersome.

As one might expect, some of the visualizations that Singer inspires can be terribly gruesome (if you can think of a description that carries more force than "terribly gruesome," then consider yours to be a more accurate one). Assuming that the reader is both a human being and of sound mind, they will undoubtedly find that this book will leave them at times speechless, pained, or simply unable to read on.

As far as I know, Singer is the first to point out that child warriors are making possible a new kind of war, a war without ideology or purpose other than taking something someone else has. Adults fight better with a cause and a purpose--children are more easily drugged, brainwashed, and cut off from other support. They can also be far crueler in battle and harder to rehabilitate. Singer points to responses to lessen the problem, but she is far from optimistic.

This is a nice personal interest read about a well to do Armenian family living in northern New Jersey. What makes it different is the undertone of a family tragedy suffered in faraway Armenia during 1915. During that time, the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire sought to kill or dispossess 1.5 million Armenians of their lives and property. The author's grandparents suffered enormously and their parents and siblings died through the most brutal methods. When the Balakian was growing up, there was always something under the surface of their family. The author's parents did not educate how their family suffered during this time. When the author does a term paper on Turkey for his high school class and gets an A, his father is angered on the subject he selected.

The one thing that stands out in this memoir is that the Turks still deny they did anything wrong. A recent amendment in the U.S. Senate was defeated due to Turkish pressure to label this a genocide. This despite the fact that this happened over 90 years ago. Somehow the Turkish people and nation chooses to not assume guilt on one of the first mass murders in the world's history.

The book gets off to a slow start with several chapters on Balakian's grandmother. Some of the writings suggest mystical happenings like the black dog and blue lady. After that the author focuses in on his family and the tragedy of Armenia. One thing that I think the author got wrong is when the Young Turks assumed command of the Ottoman government. Two Sultans ruled from 1908 till 1920. They were figureheads to the Young Turk government. Other than that, an interesting read.

A very good, well written story of the author's discovery of his own Armenian roots and the genocide of 1915 of which his grandmother was a survivor. It also is about one half of an autobiography, detailing the author's upbringing in suburban New Jersey.

The first three parts of the book are subtitled Grandmother, Mother, Farther. I feel the book should have jumped into the Armenian part of the story much faster. A better course might have been to make the leap from Grandmother to the old country and then fill in the backstory of the author's upbrining in New Jersey.

According to the dusk jacket, the author was born in 1951, as was I, so I can testify to the veracity of his account of those times.

Much of sections set in Turkey during the time of the Armenian genocide are given over the official documents about the event, as if the author were uncertain his own word would be enough to convince the audience. Given the Turkish government's commitment to denial on this issue, I suppose that is understandable.

I just finished reading this book. It tells the story of a boy growing up in the 1950s who along with his Armenian grandmother who shared a love of the NY Yankees growing up in New Jersey. It also tells the trauma of the past telling the story about some of his family members killed by the Turkish government in 1915. It is well written and I loved the story. It's a really good book if you want a good read. It was both happy and sad. It also brought back a lot of memories of a bygone era. I liked it a lot.

The story of the author's grandmother is the same as the story my grandmother told me. Yes, her entire family was killed by the Turks. As a small child, I attended the Armenain school where all of us would compare stories as to how our grandparents survived the death marches. It is a very nice story that tells about history, a history that is kept hidden for many political reasons. Until the world fully ackhowledges what happened to the Armenians, and punishes the Turks, many more genocides and attorcities will take place. After all, if the Turks can get away with the torture, killing, rapes, and genocide (while countries such as the United States let them get away with it), then other similar regimes will committ similar attorcities.
I storngly recommend this book.

Peter Balakian's book, "Black Dog of Fate," tries to be too many things
and sadly fails at many of them. In essence, it is an attempt to tell a
sort of Armenian-American story which I find not overly interesting or
compelling. I wish the author had done a bit more in-depth work to learn
about his people and their rich heritage before embarking to represent it
or explain it or share it with non-Armenians, for he has much more to absorb
and understand himself first. I find the Armenianness in this book to be
tentative, unengaged and unconvincing. Pity, since the author seems to
have a lot of passion in his pursuit of other aspects of his life such as
football, the Yankees, modern poetry, and exposing Turkish attempts to
buy (among others) Princeton professors to act as mouthpieces giving
legitimacy to their vile historical revisionism, practiced by the
"modern" Turkish state and its organs.

It seems to be all the rage these days to elevate personal histories and
family testimonials into the realm of fiction and novels. The "I" and "we"
and "us" occupy center stage and the reader is invited to enjoy the
intimacy that must surely be in place via this artifice. But is it realy?
Since in order to make this legitimate, the writer must distance himself,
at least initially, from all this old world exotica, and like the reader,
question their validity or relevance in present day North American
society. What are all these old world, old fashioned ghosts and traditions?,
is the first cry of writer and reader alike, only, ofcourse, to be followed
by a sharp bank turn where the writer steers the satisfied and in-place
reader towards the opposite viewpoint wherein *this* culture and *this*
lifestyle become suspect in light of some tentative spotting of cultural
wealth that has been traded in or abandoned in order to swim swiftly towards
materialistic, memory-free, self-redefining, "comfort" seeking and buying
mores.

In the Balakian tale, one encounters suburbia instead of substance,
worldly goods acquisition instead of deep roots that steady the soul,
immediate family and relatives running away from their true identities either
towards surrealism, the abstract and unemotional, or else towards medicine,
respectability and detachment. Young Balakian observes but never
understands "the grandmother" for she is shielded culturally from being
able to reach him by her very offsprings who can not and will not instill
the Armenian identity he will eventually seek but never quite find. Their
crime is self-denial and a march to the tune of America's mixmaster
piper. "Be unlike your past and your future will be brighter," seems to be
what America promises, at the very least. The intermediate generation listens
and adopts this credo and Peter is left to find out but never quite
understand just what cost his ancestors have paid to remain Armenian and
to preserve our culture before the final denials on New Jersey pateos while
enjoying, as if to serve sweet irony, full course Armenian meals and the
mixing aromas of delicacies from the old country every Sunday.

Peter is lost alright, but as the book sadly shows, he remains lost.
Paraphrasing or quoting Ambassador Morgenthau does not an Armenian genocide
expert make. Personal family testimonials of the Turkish atrocities does
not a genocide history make (For that, read Vahakn Dadrian's "The History
of the Armenian Genocide" Berghahn Books, 1995). Episodic accounts can be
dismissed by the Turks as hear-say and as mere isolated incidents, leading
to more harm than good (for if better evidence existed, the arguement
goes, why would anyone resort to such flimsy fare?). For the story to have
worked, for the story to have *really* worked, as I would have liked it to,
Balakian's life and lifestyle would have had to have changed
significantly and his child rearing practices would have had to reflect
it, and his relationship with his wife who, like him, is not leading a strongly
Armenian existence, would have had to have changed, solidifying his roots,
celebrating his new found identity, and nurturing the metamorphosis by
sustained community involvment and grass roots movement participation
which, alas, never appear on the pages of this book. How else to explain
the lack of a turning around of the tide of assimilation to which Balakian
is a grand personal witness, except that the transition has not occured?
The ship of Armenianness sails by Balakian. He is finally aware enough to
be able to identify the ship and wave it goodbye and write about it, but
not resolved enough to climb aboard. That is how the book fails and that is
how his story fails. This is a story of assimilation and loss with a bit of
mid stream self awareness thrown in. For a real story of an Armenian
finding his roots and letting them take root in his own life and future,
read Mark Arax's book, "In my Father's Name (Simon & Schuster, 1996),"
where the transition is real and the early youth of disaffection is
replaced by a profound adoption of our essence revealed in exquisite
frankness and power by Mark Arax. One can only hope that Balakian's
partial reorientation towards our culture and traditions and essence will
somehow continue and that some day he will wish to live with a more meaningful
attachment to our cause and needs than merely as an able observer (not
withstanding his laudible actions as an April 24th -- Armenian genocide
commemoration speaker and an exposer of Turkish infiltration in the US
academic arena by buying spokesmen turned professors who mascarade as
unbiased researchers). This criticism I direct to the predecessor of this
genre of American Armenian writing first and to Balakian second. I speak
here of "passage to Ararat" by Michael Arlen (Hungry Mind republication,
1996) where a disinterested soit-disant Armenian goes to Armenia in the
70's and by the end of the short trip is somewhat more closely touched by
this strange people's woes and dreams. Too little, too late, and always
detached, is all I can say to these meagre displays of ethnic or cultural
reorientation. Much more needs to be absorbed before the essence is
transmitted to future generations to take and behold.

However, I remain hopeful that future transformatory stories and ethnic
identity survival stories *will be* written which will show that the tide
of assimilation and cultural abandonment are not the only outcome of this
experiment of transplanting peoples and cultures to this continent we
proudly call our home.

Human rights are rights considered to be held by individuals simply because they are part of the human species. They are rights, in essence, shared equally by everyone regardless of sex, race, nationality, or ethnic background. They are universal in content. Despite this fairly straight forward definition, the recognition of human rights by individuals, groups, societies, states, and nations has been a constant battle across both space and time. Throughout the centuries groups or societies have failed to recognize certain human rights of individuals, groups, and cultures while at the same time recognizing those of others. Likewise, conflicting political traditions have elaborated different components of human rights or differed over which elements had priority. Today, the manifold meanings of human rights embodied in this definition reflects this process of history and change.

Presenting this long and conflicted history in one of the more accessible and comprehensive editions to date, The History of Human Rights by Micheline R. Ishay is the authoritative text on the subject. Using the main points developed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the book chronicles the clashes of ideas, social movements, and armies that comprise the history of human rights. This history, although largely told from a Western perspective does encompass the perspective of those who have struggled to obtain them. Framing the history of human rights development through six core arguments, The History of Human Rights offers not only a comprehensive history and analysis, but also the basis for a discussion of where human rights needs to progress. This last component is what gives this book particular importance for indigenous peoples. As lucidly covered through six in-depth chapters, one of the final battles in the history of human rights will be over the rights of cultures, and particularly the inherent rights of indigenous peoples and their cultural lifeways in relation to state, national, and international rights.

Beginning with the controversy of human rights and religion, Ishay argues that each great religion contains important humanistic elements which have contributed to our modern conceptions of rights. For example, in the West, the impact of Judeo-Christian morality and ethics has been central to the development of human rights. As Ishay notes Judeo-Christian morality was secularized, separated from politics, and strengthened in influence by the advent of capitalism and colonialism in Europe, largely at the expense of other notions of ethics. Because of the development of capitalism in Europe, Judeo-Christian ethics became secularized with the progress of the Reformation (16th century) and the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, finally being transformed into a liberal discourse that dominates our current conception of human rights.

This leads to Ishay's second major argument in The History of Human Rights: that our modern conception of rights, wherever in the world they may be currently voiced, are predominantly European in origin. Not only are they largely founded on a secularized version of Judeo-Christian ethics, but that their current definition largely originated out of this European beginning. As Ishay correctly argues, this does not imply that Western rights are reducible to contemporary free-market liberalism, but rather that the human rights vision currently depicted as liberal is in fact indelibly molded by the socialist ideals that grew out of nineteenth-century European industrialization and secularized Judeo-Christian ethics.

As Ishay clearly articulates, the two documents most responsible for modern legal formulations of human rights are the American Bill of Rights and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Both of these documents were the result of various social movements in the pre-industrial era. When industrialization took over in Europe and America, becoming an all consuming process, these documents coupled with the previously secularized Judeo-Christian ethical thought became the guiding ideologies in human rights definitions.

As such, our modern liberal take on human rights is also indebted to the social thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ishay's third argument). Current attempts at asserting universal human rights, as The History of Human Rights argues, are defensive mechanisms against either liberal or socialist ideologies, since these ideologies presumably represent the oppressive legacy of Western imperial and colonial domination of the world.

The fourth argument in The History of Human Rights builds on the previous three, as the progress of human rights moved from individual to social, and finally cultural in scope. As such, Ishay contends that cultural rights must always be informed by, and checked against, a universalist perspective of human rights.

Like religious rights, the notion of cultural rights, so strongly advocated by liberal nationalists in nineteenth-century Europe (and later championed during the twentieth-century post-colonial struggle) was largely rejected by socialists because it caused a disjunction between group solidarity and universal human rights (p. 131). Challenging liberal ambiguities, many socialists pointed out that the primary beneficiaries of cultural rights were more often particular groups or individuals within the culture, and not the culture as a cohesive whole.

If we cannot trace the history and development of human rights in a linear fashion of progression from the individual to the social to the cultural, how can we say there has been any progress made in their development? This is Ishay's fifth argument: has there been any progress through history towards a universal set of human rights. Her contention is that there has been, although not necessarily through the recognized mechanisms. This in spite of President Roosevelt's 1945 proclamation that the United Nations would "spell the end of the system of unilateral action, ... the balances of power, and all the expedients that have been tried for centuries - and have always failed" (Roosevelt 1950: 570).

In short, universal human rights are always potentially endangered by particularist and vague conceptions of rights framed in terms of the "national interest," "national security," the right to "individual self-determination," or "cultural rights." Therefore, we must constantly keep vigilance on those who are in power and those who define human rights and their scope. This last point leads to The History of Human Rights' final point; a question rather then an argument.

Is globalization a boon or a threat from a human rights perspective. This is an especially important question when looking at the human rights progress in terms of indigenous peoples. As Ishay argues, and I would agree, the answer is that globalization has the potential to be a boon for human rights, but that we are not there yet. With the development of global information technology, Human Rights Peacenet, Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources, Amnesty International, and a multitude of other websites human rights advocates now have unprecedented possibilities for fighting. One cannot overlook the success of the human rights community's "infopressure" on the Mexican government during the Chiapas rebellion or the human rights "infoactivity" during the turbulent events in Tiananmen Square or against Indonesia's repression in East Timor.

However, we have not reached a nadir, we are still fighting an uphill battle. Not only has globalization opened new networks and avenues, but it has also allowed unprecedented human rights violations to occur. The illegal war in Iraq, China's occupation of Tibet, and the taking of land and natural resources from indigenous peoples are just a few. Human rights are still not universal. The best way to fight for their universal application is to know their history. The History of Human Rights is the best place to start. By knowing where we have come from, and how we got here, we can positively move forward. The History of Human Rights should be on everyone's reading list.

Make a difference. Know the history. Change the future.

[...]

What I really liked about this book was its emphasis on human rights and how previous and current laws help or hurt human rights. This book is very useful if you want to know where some of the laws we have today came from. It also compares the religious traditions and their laws. Overall, I liked this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in human rights history.

This book is a great overall history of human rights. I really liked how it talked about the origin of ideas and then wove those ideas throughout the book. It's a very well-researched and complete work. One thing that does is make several assertions that are extremely contentious among human rights scholars; for example it contends that human rights is a concept that is western in origin.

Ishay's introduction outlines an ambitious book, tracing human rights' origins and evolution over an immense historical period. However, what the introduction promises the body fails to deliver. Ishay spends most of her time simply recounting European history, and even that is done in such a maddeningly tangential way as to render it essentially useless. The book is a collection of facts, utterly lacking a cohesive argument or understanding. And some attempts are simply laughable - her attempt to explain the hegemony of the Western conception of rights is bland paraphrasing of Jared Diamond and leaves a question that could occupy the entire volume to be answered in mere pages. Please save your time and buy something else!

Although much of the book provides a good background for much of Western history though the goggles of Human Rights, it at time seems to skip and distort aspects of it. How did benevolent religions sanction large scale war? Robespierre was not a champion of human rights by killing 20,000 people. Why are human rights still so in danger today? Don't get me wrong though, if you are looking for a historical read and do not have a lot of knowledge about European History, pick this up.

Jeremi Suri presents Henry Kissinger in a very unique way, unfamiliar to traditional biographies. His writing and analytic abilities set this book far ahead of any others. Sure, you may read an eight hundred epic on every little think Kissinger did. In "Henry Kissinger and the American Century" the author provides a concise analysis of Kissinger's life and its implications on his later decisions which have gathered such controversy and his impact upon history as a whole.
A fantastic, well written, unique take on Henry Kissinger - a man who is, without a doubt, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.
Five Stars - I can't think of a bad thing about it.

In "Henry Kissinger and the American Century," Jeremi Suri has chronicled the political history of arguably one of the world's most brilliant personalities. Suri's book leaves out much of Kissinger's personal history, beyond his childhood in Weimar and Nazi Germany, which is generally vague. "Henry Kissinger and the American Century" does, however, provide readers with the background necessary to begin to understand the man and his policies. Suri pays particular attention to Kissinger's skepticism of democracy, which truly helped shape those policies.
Henry Kissinger is a Cold War oracle, subject to the failings of the human condition as any of us, but arguably far more attuned to the strategic and political situation than anyone ever was.
Suri does not dodge logical criticisms and critics and provides a groundwork for understanding of Kissinger's philosophies. Reading the book, you might notice how just when you begin to forget Kissinger's German-Jewish childhood, Suri extols this fact in context throughout.
The book reveals Kissinger's innate ability to address both his genteel and gentile contemporaries. If any American in history ever leveraged their "outsider" status to the maximum and re-define the idea of an "insider", it was Kissinger.
The book is full of exceptional quotes from Kissinger, his influences and his contemporaries that are no less relevant in the War on Terror than they were in the Cold War.
REVIEW EVERY BOOK YOU READ!

Henry A. Kissinger, one of a handful of memorable secretaries of state, is a German-born Jew haunted by the failure of democracy in his birthplace and the subsequent failure of the world's democracies to stop the Nazi drive for mastery of Europe in the 1930s. Those failures made possible the massive slaughter of World War II, the nearly total destruction of Jewish life in Europe (which marked Kissinger personally)and in its aftermath left the United States and the exercise of its power the main arbiter of the world's fate. Stalin's Soviet Union, however, had other plans.
Kissinger did not view war with Soviet Russia as inevitable, nor did he regard Russian ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe as altogether unreasonable. But he did think that unless America was willing to project its power in strategic areas of the world, such as Europe and the Middle East, and confront Soviet ambitions in those areas, the Cold War would be lost with dire consequences for Americans.
Kissinger thought the Cold War would make strange bedfellows--reactionary kings, military dictators and strongman-types whose personal vanity outweighed any concern for the future of their people.
Kissinger was a supreme realist. He did not seek the make the world a better place, only a safer one for his adopted country and its friends.
His hero was Metternich, of Congress of Vienna and Balance of Power fame. There was no room for sentimentality, and not much room for public opinion, in his world view. Wars and rumors of wars were not only expected, but exploited by Kissinger, which his critics viewed as coldly cynical, immoral and in some cases (Vietnam, Chile) indifferent to human lives.
Kissinger owed his power, at the height of his career, to Richard M. Nixon, whose feelings toward Jews were mixed at best, bigoted at worst.
Oddly, his Jewish background was an asset in dealing with Arab rulers. They figured that American Jews dictated U.S. policy in the Mideast anyhow, so Kissinger essentially cut out the middle man.
The only weakness of the book is its brevity (less than 300 pages) which doesn't leave much room for analysis of complicated issues. Nuclear weapons negotiations are barely mentioned. None the less, an excellent introduction to a complex man who left a large imprint on America's place in the world.

Packaging the presidency is the most complete and accurate book about presidential advertising and communication of the period ending with the 1992 presidential election. Sometimes humorous, sometimes cynical, Kathleen Jamieson takes us in a travel back in time within the intricacies of political communication strategies. This is the best book that I have ever read on this subject. This book was recommended to me by another Presidency specialist, Stephen J. Wayne, when I was studying at Georgetown: this book is really a must read! Thanks Kathleen and thanks Professor Wayne.

Jamison has successfully covered the intricasies of presidential campaign advertising from the beginning of the Republic up to the 1992 campaign. A well organized and thoughtful book that is easy to read.

This book is probably the msot thoughful about presidential campaign advertising. You read it like a novel!

I was required to read this book for a course and was my first experience with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and I am now one of her biggest fans.

She provides thoughtful, non-partisan analysis (rare in this age of personal commentary) of political advertisements. She discusses what worked, what didn't and why in a clear, thought-provoking yet easy to read manner.

Some of her best work. If you are interested in advertising or politics this book is a must have.

I decided to take the AP Comparative Government exam at the last minute. I ordered this book and took notes on the introduction and read through the rest. I wasn't sure I'd done enough, but I just got my score back: I got a five. This book prepares you for everything on the exam and is an excellent self-study resource. If you have a little extra time, buy this book and take the exam. Might as well get some extra college credit!

I decided to take the AP Comparative test as I as already in the US Gov/Politics course. After wallowing through the year without really reading my independent study book for the course, I realized about two weeks from the test date that I would essentially be guaranteeing myself a 3 or lower without any actual knowledge of the country cases and whatnot.

Ordered this book and read it in less than 5 days. Took the test and received a 5.

The book is nicely divided into overviews and then country cases. The test questions at the end of the section closely imitates that which actually appear on the AP test. While examples are provided in the text in regards to situations with the countries, it is always encouraged that you note recent events, as AP graders will take those into account when grading your test, even if it's past the normal curriculum that is expected to be known.

The fact that this was able to replace a textbook in clarity and knowledge surprised me. If you want a concise look at comparative government with unparalleled attention to detail, look no further.

Lots of textbook and study guide on US but only a few books can be found on Comparative!!
Among very few, this one is the best at least so far.

If you are a patient reader, and want to know how the United States has been involved in the Mid-East Peace Process since 1967, this is an amazing book. It helped me understand the roots of anti-Americanism. The later presidents are subjected to more analysis by Quandt than the earlier ones.

Bill Quandt's volume on the American role in the Middle East peace process reads more as a chronology of events than a real analytical piece of history. The author devotes an extradinary amount of detail to minor events and actions without really explaining the motives of the players behind the actions. The strongest part of the book is the Presidential Crisis decision making model, in which he explains how he feels US policy on the issue is molded. There is little to judge against, however, since the author does not really do justice to the other theories of US decisionmaking on the middle east. Whether or not he agrees with them, he could at least tell us why he thinks they are incorrect. And finally, the amount of minutia the author goes into ends up leaving the reader wishing he would just decide to highlight a few important events and motives.

This book provides an excellent analysis of the American involvement in the Arab Israeli conflict. It categorizes the conflict's resolution as a process evolving towards peace. The book picks up in 1967 with American involvement in trying to resolve the six day war and the aftermath where the Arab countries began thinking about a resolution to the conflict. The 1973 war marked another turning point in the conflict and the US response began to crystallize and become consistent with a possible solution. It became clear that the Soviet Union's quiet acquiesce would be necessary. The American negotiations are very clearly laid out in this book and the author does an excellent job of establishing motive. This is a wonderful book if you have a good knowledge of the conflict. For those seeking that history I would recommend Benny Morris book Righteous Victims.
This book really shines in the Nixon and on era where the author clearly categorizes the diplomatic efforts of the Kissinger Shuttle, Camp David Accords, the Oslo agreements and the Road Map. Overall the author is fairly unbiased and places blame where appropriate. The one place where this is lacking is in the analysis of George W. Bush. While Bush has done little towards solving the crisis the second to last chapter is more about the war in Iraq and why it was a bad plan than why it detracted from the ability to focus on the Arab Israeli conflict. Despite this it is still the best book we have on American diplomatic history in this conflict and well worth the time to read if you want to understand the conflict.

I feel that this book deals beautifully with the issues it tries to attend to. Quandt manages to bring a fresh perspective to the middle eastern situation, which is a good change from most other books of this source. This is by far one of the best books on the middle eastern peace talks i have ever read and i would strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about it.

This detailed account of the American peace process in the Arab Israeli conflict is written by William Quandt, who has served Nixon and Carter on the National Security council.
Quandt tells what diplomatic moves the United States made to bring peace between Israel and the Arabs.

The account begins with the Six Day war. After the Six Day war the Arabs wanted Israel to give back land they had taken and justice for the Palestinians. The Israelis wanted peace and the Arabs to recognize Israel's right to exist. But the Israelis had no intention of giving up land, and the Arabs were not likely to recognize Israel's legitimacy

Tension existed in the Middle East until war broke out again in October 1973. Kissinger had ignored the Middle East until then, after which he negotiated continually in the Middle East under Nixon and Ford to bring peace to keep the Soviets from exploiting the chaos.

Carter started negotiations in the 70s, after Begin began construction of settlements on the lands captured in the Six Day war, indicating that the lands would be permanently held by Israel, making peace with the Arabs much more difficult. Carter worked hard to gain peace between Israel and Egypt which cost him in domestic politics. Carter mentioned the Palestinians for the first time in the negotiations

Under Reagan there were a lot of plans, but little was accomplished. After the Gulf War Bush restarted peace negotiations, hoping that the Palestinians support of Saddam Hussein would weaken them, and the collapse of the Soviet Union would remove support for the Arabs. Quandt ends with an account of Clinton's attempts at peace in the Mideast.

Quandt concludes that certain conditions must be met to gain success. There must be a realist appraisal of the regional situation, presidents like Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan considered Mideast policy as part of US Soviet relations. The President and his top advisors must work together in the negotiations, not like in the Rogers plan. There must be domestic support for American policy, a problem for Carter. Success as a mediator depends on a feeling for both process and substance. There must be quiet negotiation and preparation for negotiations. Pressure only succeeds if carefully exerted. Timing is crucial for successful negotiations.

Because this book is about the peace process between America and Israel,
there is almost no information about the domestic politics of any countries, especially the Arab countries. This book includes a good bibliography, and some good maps.

When this first came out I nearly missed it because it appeared too short to be anything but a simplistic popularised summary. Thank goodness I did start browsing, because not only did the style have me hooked, the argument's balance and lucidity, and (whatever Likudnik propagandists may say) the thoroughly scholarly grounding of the account, made me realise that here at last I had the perfect introductory text for the intelligent student entering upon a study of modern Middle Eastern history and politics. It has been a top recommendation in my final-year university course on Middle East politics ever since. The only frustration has been that, since it went out of print in the UK, my students have had to rey on the few library copies and my own. I shall now be directing them to Amazon to get their own copy - and order some more for the library.

The book somehow manages to synthesise a mass of historical detail and controversy into a straightforward but finely judged account, bringing out all the key themes and dynamics: this is not only a list of facts and events, but a compelling analysis. He brings to life especially well the interplay of external actors (especially Britain, France and the US) and regional factors (the calculations of regional elites, balancing between dynastic/regime ambitions and the constraints of the international environment; and in places the outbursts of popular anger against both regimes and outsiders - including against the influx of Jewish settlers and eventually the establishment of Israel).

The book wears its scholarship and erudition lightly - but it is perhaps only someone as thoroughly grounded in the disciplines of International Relations and History as is professor Shlaim, that could perform this feat with such apparent ease and elegance.

Serious scholars of the region, while perhaps willing to quibble with small details, will (and indeed do) agree about the author's mastery of the material and the soundness of his judgement. That he ties a number of observations to the historical analysis that have a political flavour about current events (e.g. about US foreign policy), does not make the historical analysis itself any less rewarding. Nor indeed can the conclusions regarding the current shape of the Palestine problem be dismissed (as happens in one or two of the other reviews on this site) except by those with the sorts of preconceived convictions (and political agendas?) that brook no challenge.

This is a little gem of a book, and one of those few that serve the wider public as well as the novice student of Middle Eastern affairs. Buy it and help persuade the publishers (and the author!) to bring out an updated edition for the mid-2000s!

Daniel Pipes said about this book:

"With uncommon skill, Shlaim has managed-in the confines of a very small volume with very large margins-to pack misjudgments, arrogance, and lack of sense into 1994's worst book on the Middle East."

Well, is that true? Probably. But just to show everyone that I am not only tolerant and soft-hearted, but generous, I'll give this book not just one, but two stars!

You see, there are plenty of facts in this small book. In addition to the misjudgments, arrogance, and lack of sense which it does indeed abound with.

Shlaim claims that the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke the diplomatic stalemate in the region and led to peace. He's not the only one to have said this. But I wouldn't consider saying something like this on a dare. I'd be laughed out of town! Could I say with a straight face that the way to start negotiations towards peace is to launch a war of aggression against a neighbor? No. And just how strong is the peace between Egypt and Israel anyway? Not very. It is more a cease-fire than a peace, with a constant barrage of anti-Israeli propaganda from the Egyptian side.

After that, we see Shlaim explain that land-poor Israel can have territory or peace. Really? I think it is more reasonable for those who want peace to permit land-poor nations to buy or keep something closer to their fair share of land. In my opinion, Israel is more likely to have both territory and peace or neither of them than one or the other. And the author says that Israel can have territory or American support. Again, this could well be a false choice. Even if Israel, for some reason, can not have both American support and territory, why ought one expect it to have American support if it does not have territory?

Shlaim sums up the problem of the Arabs versus the Jews. Security pleases the Jews. Fairness pleases the Arabs. I wish this were true.

Let's see. Fairness. Does that mean letting everyone, including Jews and Arabs, buy land throughout the region and keep it? Does that mean a Truth and Reconciliation session or two where the Arabs can apologize for their violence and aggression against Levantine Jews? Sounds fair to me! Shlaim is totally out of line to pretend that it is unfair to not steal Jewish land, or that it is unfair to allow Israel to stay on the map.

As for the Oslo peace accords, Shlaim praises them as the beginning of a new era. Plenty of people were extremely suspicious of Oslo. Shlaim was wrong here. And those who were suspicious of Oslo generally had the right reasons to be suspicious. I think that ought to make us more than a little suspicious of Shlaim.

Now, what does Shlaim recommend? It is simple. America is simply too much in favor of Israel! Shlaim thinks we need a more "even-handed" approach. And that (this was written before 9/11) America ought not "bolster Israel as a strategic partner in an unwinnable war against an imaginary Islamic threat." Wow. Imaginary. But unbeatable. Shlaim really took a strong view here. I think 9/11 showed that we're dealing with a real, not an imaginary threat. And in the long run, why shouldn't a war in favor of truth, justice, and human rights be winnable? I see no reason to give up without even trying.

If you want to learn about war and peace in the Middle East, try some other book.

This is a brief work which bills itself as "A Concise History." Concise it is, and at fewer than 150 pages its pace is of a necessity very efficient, except at points where the author pauses to vent toxic fumes that rise from his belly while digesting certain of the more combustible materials of Middle Eastern history. Schlaim is an avowed revisionist--which is not to say propagandist--and is not delicate when recounting events in Israel's past at uncomfortable odds with history as taught in Tel Aviv elementary schools.

Nor is he inhibited--when incomplete historical records require extrapolation in order to connect dots otherwise forever separated--in offering his own sometimes byzantine, usually cynical, always overweight conjecture. If he succeeds in nothing else, it's in noting the inherent weakness of national folklores in which fragments of credible history are mortared into cohesion using generous spadefuls of agreeable, pleasant myth. Iron walls they are not. A true enough assertion, and perhaps of greater ultimate value to the reader than a dry listing of names, dates and events--even if it could be argued that the latter was the implied good or service, the thing you bargained for when picking up the book.

Having said that, I'll also say that I couldn't find, nor have since discovered any error in any fact Schlaim presented as such. There are times when a "revisionist" would be more aptly titled a "correctionist."

If I have a serious critique, it's that he at times overstepped the boundaries of both historian and social commentator in order to satisfy personal disdain he felt for some of the characters in the drama. Such as Ronald Reagan, for instance, whom he accused not only of "...intellectual mediocrity and lax leadership," but of spending "...sleepless afternoons in the White House worrying about the Soviet threat."

Get it? (wink, nod). Poor Ronnie was so afflicted with old age and infirmity that pressures of the job cut into his afternoon naps. Not the best nor worst old joke I heard spoken during Reagan's presidency, but Schlaim chose the wrong venue for it. With a scant 150 pages to wedge both a history and bloated personal perspective of the Middle East into, malicious humor would have been better held for Volume II, if only to preserve the dignity of Volume I.

This book is a nice introduction to the great powers' influence on international relations of Middle Eastern countries. Surely, it offers a partial picture which is mostly about the role of great powers in shaping international relations in the Middle East. But it does a good job in doing what it does. Some of the stories and argumensts are so important for understanding contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. Here are some excerps from the books:

"The Ottoman Empire had provided a far from perfect political system, but it worked. During WWI Britain and it allies destroyed the old order in the Arabic-speaking Middle East without considering the long-term consequences."

"Nixon and Kissenger also aided the shah in his compaign to destabilize the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad. In 1972 they agreed to covert American-Israeli-Iranian action in support of the Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq."

"[regarding Iran-Iraq war] Kissinger summed up the general preference when he indicated that the best outcome would be for both sides to lose."

"[The Iran-Iraq war] started as a result of rivalries inside rather than outside, but Reagan's intervention prolonged it unnecessarily."

"On July 31 [1990], three days before Iraqi troops charged into Kuwait John Kelly [the US assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian Affairs] testified on Capitol Hill that America had no treaty and no commitement obliging it to send forces should Kuwait be overrun."

"[The Gulf War] also demontrated that Americans are better at short, sharp burst of military intervention designed to restore the status quo than at sustained political engagement to resolve the undrlying origins of instability in the Middle East."

"Most of the American mistakes in the last half century can be traced to the combination of globalism and the Israel-first approach."

Rather than a concise history of the Middle East this book offers only 146 pages of brief summary of outside powers effects on the region.

This isn't a history of the Middle East, it's a history of how Europe, the US and the Soviet Union interacted with the Middle East. Though undeniably important in understanding the region, Western and Eastern relations with the Middle East are not the only reasons for studying it. There is more going on, far more, that Shlaim does not address, and it opens a large crediblility gap.

What is missing? A lot.

This might be a good book if it's only goal were to teach people a very concise history of Western and Eastern relations to the Middle East, so perhaps it is just poorly titled. The information that it did offer though seemed good enough, and it provided a fair overview of US relations with the Middle East, but I expected more and was dissapointed.