Book Description
Charlie Wilson's War was a publishing sensation and a New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times bestseller. In the early 1980s, a Houston socialite turned the attention of maverick Texas congressman Charlie Wilson to the ragged band of Afghan "freedom fighters" who continued, despite overwhelming odds, to fight the Soviet invaders. Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen. The arms were secretly procured and distributed with the help of an out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrokotos, whose working-class Greek-American background made him an anomaly among the Ivy League world of American spies. Avrakotos handpicked a staff of CIA outcasts to run his operation and, with their help, continually stretched the Agency's rules to the breaking point. Moving from the back rooms of the Capitol, to secret chambers at Langley, to arms-dealers' conventions, to the Khyber Pass, this book presents an astonishing chapter of our recent past, and the key to understanding what helped trigger the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and ultimately led to the emergence of a brand-new foe in the form of radical Islam.
Customer Reviews:
Hopefully, the movie doesn't screw up this story.......2007-10-05
There will be three main kinds of people who won't read this book. The first are those who see no reason for military intervention anywhere, ever. The second are those who are hypersensitive to any speaking of ethnicity, race, gender, etc., within a kilometer of earshot. The third are those who don't like long books, and "Charlie Wilson's War" is certainly longer than most. All this would be too bad, because the book is a wealth of little known and critical current history, as well as a real rip-snorting adventure. The most intriguing icing on the cake is that Charlie Wilson, one of the boldest and effective national-interest congressmen of the last century, was a Democrat. He was a Democrat who pushed Republicans forward for a decade, mostly to do the right things. How many right things, of course, remains to be seen in coming decades.
Much of the book is written in colloquial style, as the author reproduces many discussions among a very wide variety of people. This sometimes comes out sounding a little coarse, but the reader should see this quickly as a writer trying to be accurate. Charlie Wilson, the man himself, also might turn many readers off. He abused his body with food and drink, mostly drink; he was a maverick to the point of almost being a loose canon; wild, he certainly was. No one, though, can deny that he was one of those rarest of politicians. Here was a man who did not stop with saying what he wanted to do, he found ways to do what needed to be done. Then he kept at it, and at it. Here was a man of his word.
This interesting story suffers only a small weakness as a narrative, and only if the reader minds. The action chapter by chapter, even section by section, does not always tell us what was happening at the same time with other people, and at other places. Rather, the author likes to keep a thread of a theme or thought and follow it to the end. This can be irritating and a little confusing if you are trying to keep things straight for any particular group of years at a time. If this does not make a problem for reader, then so much the better. A last suggestion: this book goes down especially well by audio CD, and the voice narrator does well with dialogs and accents.
A great true story.......2007-10-04
This is a truly amazing tale. Never told until now and soon a movie. Buy this book and read the true story about how a "wild" congressman and a rogue CIA agent changed history. Better by far than all those fictional adventures!
four and 1/2 stars........2007-10-01
steve coll's excellent book "ghost wars" whet my reading appetite for more on the soviet war in afghanistan. since that military action, with the unanticipated consequences it spawned for the united states, was such a catalyst for the 9/11 attacks, it seems essential for an american to get a grip on what took place there. "charlie wilson's war" is a thrilling account of that international drama. though much of the book deals with funding america's covert involvement through congressional appropriation subcommittees, and with CIA office politics, the narrative is interesting page for page throughout this long work. not once did i find it a chore to continue, or feel an urge to skip past anything. george crile brings the colorful personalities of those involved to vivid life through his clear prose. he actually makes appropriation subcommitees, and their methods of work, interesting. and his portraits of afghanistan and pakistan, and their respective political environments and key political players, is brilliantly executed. the story is told completely from the american perspective, true. you will have to seek elsewhere for a more balanced view (by this i mean one that takes into account the soviet soldiers side of things). but this book being what it is, is a fascinating read, and one you can learn much from.
Great.......2007-09-08
One of the most intriguing stories of American foreign policy making. This book was recommended to me by a staffer for a military oriented Congressional committee. He was quite emphatic in stressing that this book, better than any other, offers a great perspective on the influence Congress can have on foreign and war policy. I don't know how representative it is of the day to day activities of members of Congress, but it certainly shows how a dedicated member of Congress CAN get seriously involved in an issue.
Charlie Wilson is one of the most interesting politicians to have walked on the stage in the past 50 years. Part JFK, Nixon, LBJ, and Clinton - both good and bad parts - Wilson was a smart and dedicated defender of CIA efforts to support the mujaheden in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. More than any supposed hardline conservative, including President Reagan, Wilson, a socially liberal Democrat from Texas, was the most agressive elected official to back the CIA in its anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan. Wilson was also wildly able to get in the worst kinds of trouble: womanizing, drunk driving, and questionable uses of public money. I guess it goes to show that people are incredibly complex and contain a much more dynamic mix of good and bad within them. Kind of like the Incredible Hulk, but with less green.
Hard to read.......2007-08-29
Content was OK, I'm sure acurate, but about 210 pages into this 500+ page book I had to give in - I just couldn't make myself want to read it. I am only 31, so I do not know of Charlie Wilson, or the political temperature in the 80s, but this book was recommended to me so I tried, but couldn't make myself do it.
Book Description
"A brilliant and humane philosophy for our confused age."—Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell
Kwame Anthony Appiah's landmark new work, featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of "cosmopolitanism," a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century BC, Appiah traces its influence on the ethical legacies of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raised in Ghana, educated in England, and now a distinguished professor in the United States, Appiah promises to create a new era in which warring factions will finally put aside their supposed ideological differences and will recognize that the fundamental values held by all human beings will usher in a new era of global understanding.
Customer Reviews:
Essays by Appiah.......2007-06-27
This book is a collection of essays around a common theme; each is extremely well written, reflective and accessible to the non-specialist.
Anthony Appiah is surely one of our most important thinkers about ethical issues that arise in common life. He brings unusual color and verve to
his subjects, reflecting a childhood in Ghana and an adult life spent as a true citizen of the world in one of the world's great universities.
An importance exploration of what it means to be a responsible part of today's world.......2007-02-10
There are few individuals more qualified to write a book on the idea of cosmopolitanism than Kwame Anthony Appiah. Biracial, raised in both Ghana and England, multicultural, multilingual, educated at Cambridge but teaching at Princeton, Appiah has an inside familiarity with larger world that few can rival. It is tremendously encouraging to me, a WASP who has been unable to engage in any real travel, that we both seem to share precisely the same ideals. My experience of the world counts for little; his a great deal. Yet it shows that people with extremely different backgrounds can embrace the same ideals.
Appiah is a philosopher, but though he has clearly been raised in the Anglo-American linguistic philosophical tradition, he has not found himself restricted by it. From the various philosophers he quotes, I'm sure that he and had had similar philosophical training. I envy the way that he can make what I learned as logical positivism (Appiah lops off the "logical") and make it relevant in a discussion of wider cultural issues. Though he obviously was trained in the tradition honed by Russell, Carnap, Frege, Ryle, Austin, Anscombe, Dummett, and the large contingent of American and British logicians and philosophers of language, none of them have informed his literary style. In fact, the two writers Appiah reminds me of most are Herodotus and Montaigne. Like them, he feels a license to bring into his discussion almost anything. If he is cosmopolitan on a moral and social level, he is also as a multidisciplinarian. Nor does he hesitate at mixing cultures. Many of the most compelling passages in the book detail incidents from his experience in Ghana.
The point of the book is to discuss many of the problems that arise if one attempts to embrace--as Appiah clearly feels we all should--cosmopolitan ideals. He deals interestingly with a host of issues, from the idea of who owns the products of a culture to the incommensurability of values from one culture to another (or their possible commensurability) to whether it is problematic when there are conflicts on fundamental issues. As a person he seems to have been deeply molded by all of the cultural influences in which he grew up, but as a philosopher he is exceptionally British. Over the decades there have been a number of British thinkers who have been able to cut through a thick wad of nonsense and discuss issues in a balanced, commonsensical manner. Gilbert Ryle had this capacity, as did (sometimes) G. E. Moore, and so also Mary Midgley. While his views are unquestionably progressive, Appiah always seems to avoid extremes to arrive at conclusions that are, above all else, balanced and reasonable. He is a master at making sense. So when philosopher Peter Unger argues that we all have a moral obligation to give every penny that we do not need for our own sustenance to organizations like UNICEF and OXFAM so that food and medicine can be purchased for the desperately poor in the Third World. Appiah, on the other hand, believes that a world in which no one bought a ticket to the opera would be flat and uninteresting. Besides, what really matters is reforming local governments in order to provide long-term transformation of the socioeconomic structures in the areas most afflicted by poverty, something that giving exclusively to UNICEF and OXFAM will not accomplish (though for the record, Appiah thinks both organizations are very important and he does not discourage contributing to them). Though he does not state it as a principle, he constantly employs something akin to Aristotle's golden mean.
I especially enjoyed his chapter on The Counter-Cosmopolitans. He places many of today's Islamic extremists in this category, though he also very correctly places many Christian fundamentalists here as well. I have long fantasized about writing a book about contemporary proponents of Counter-Enlightenment ideas (a book I will never write because I haven't mastered the range of disciplines such a project would require). Isaiah Berlin wrote frequently about various Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Hamaan, but I believe it can be extended into the present for such mass movements as various religious fundamentalisms (Christian, Islamic, as well as Jewish), the New Age movement, contemporary astrology, right wing political movements, and free market capitalism. Obviously I can't make my claim here, but I found Appiah's discussion of the counter-cosmopolitans to overlap entirely with counter-enlightenment ideals.
I value this book not only for its ideals and the intelligent discussion of a host of thorny issues, but for Appiah's warm humanity and wonderful literary style. It is not merely an intelligent book but a well-written one as well.
Becoming Cosmopolitan.......2007-02-05
One of the most pernicious ideas has spung from the myth that we are necessarily separated and segregated into groups that are defined by criteria like gender, language, race, religion or some other kind of boundary. And it is easy to see that these boundaries are a major cause of conflict.
The author of this enthralling book - Kwame Anthony Appiah - challenges this kind of separative thinking by resurrecting the ancient philosophy of "cosmopolitanism." This school of thought that dates back almost 2500 years to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. They first articulated the cosmopolitan ideal that all human beings were citizens of the world. Later on, these ideas were elaborated by another group of philosophers: the Stoics.
According to Appiah, the influence of cosmopolitanism has stretched down the ages and through to the Enlightenment. He takes Immanuel Kant's notion of a League of Nations and the Declaration of the Rights of Man to be two manifestations of this ancient idea.
Appiah sees cosmopolitanism as a dynamic concept based on two fundamental ideas. First is the idea that we have responsibilities to others that are beyond those based on kinship or citizenship. Second is something often forgotten: just because other people have different customs and beliefs from ours, they will likely still have meaning and value. We may not agree with someone else, but mutual understanding should be a first goal.
The book is full of personal experiences. I doubt that anyone else could have written it: His mother was an English author and daughter of the statesman Sir Stafford Cripps, and his father a Ghanaian barrister and politician, who reminded his children to remember that they were "citizens of the world."
Appiah was educated in Ghana and England and has taught in both countries. He now holds a chair of Philosophy at Princeton. He is no starry eyed idealist, and he knows that differences between groups and nations cannot be wished away or ignored. But he contends, rightly, I think, that differences can be accepted without being allowed to become barriers.
As he says, "Cosmopolitans suppose that all cultures have enough overlap in their vocabulary of values to begin a conversation. But they don't suppose, like some Universalists, that we could all come to agreement if only we had the same vocabulary." The reason is simply this: most of us arrive at our values not on the basis of careful reasoning, but by lifelong conditioning and subjective beliefs and attitudes.
In parts of Europe, there have recently been misgivings about the growing diversity and multiculturalism of countries like the United Kingdom, with people asking whether it is doing no more than fracturing society. Appiah tackles this question head on. He has this to say, "If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, there is no place for the enforcement of diversity by trapping people within a kind of difference that they long to escape. There simply is no decent way to sustain those communities of difference that will not survive without the free allegiance of their members."
Cosmopolitanism, balances our "obligations to others" with the "value not just of human life but of particular human lives," what Appiah calls "universality plus difference." He remains skeptical about simple maxims for ethical behavior such as the Golden Rule. He swiftly demonstrates its failings as a moral precept. He argues that cosmopolitanism is the name not "of the solution but of the challenge."
This is an important book that will inevitably be controversial. In a world that is becoming more interconnected and shrinking by the day, and where the "clash of cultures" threatens our existence, Appiah has many new perspectives as he articulates a precise yet flexible ethical manifesto. He does not claim to have all the answers, but this book should be of interest to all of us as we try to make sense of the turmoil, challenges and opportunities of our globalizing world.
Current and relevant.......2007-01-05
Very insightful. Draws on past scholarship to apply to our world today.
Brilliant.......2006-08-31
Excellent, Brilliant and full of wisdom. This is from a philosopher who has the ability to see things from more perspectives than black and white. His book is concise and not too academic. He makes philosophy trendy. He is a new generation of thinkers that will reshape our thoughts. He tackles sensitive issues with respect for all parties. One cannot tell his sentiments due to his fairness and objectivity. The first book I will read a second time.
Customer Reviews:
Opened my eyes.......2007-07-19
I read this about 8 years after it was written, and it opened my eyes. Not in the sense of seeing the world as being driven by conspiracy, but as seeing the world as driven by economics. People who worry about the conspiracies are missing the more important information it conveys.
Traditional history sees the world moved by Politics, Religion, Conquest, etc. All that is good as far as it goes, but what this book revealed to me is that economics are a raw force of nature, and nothing can deviate too far from where that force leads. I don't think it was the author's intent that be the main message of the book, but it was my main conclusion after reading it. If we understand the force of economics and work with them, amazing things can be done. If we try to ignore them, we will live in the dark, always mystified about what comes to pass and what does not.
This has huge ramifications. For a contemporary example; if you want to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, how will it be done? If you try to get everyone to "quit emmitting" you are never going to succeed. You have to look at the problem as an economic problem and find a way to make it pay (and I don't just mean credits) to reduce co2 levels. That is just an example issue, it is true of almost anything. Want your religion to prosper? Want to reduce poverty? If you really want it to happen, you must work through the economics of the change you desire and find a way to make them work, but without ignoring the traditional ways of effecting change at the same time.
First Stone in the Digital Study of Abusive Wealth.......2007-01-05
This is a very long book, longer than Laurie Garrett's "BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Global Collapse of Public Health," and it has taken me over two months, between other easier to read books, to examine. I strongly recommend that W. Cleon Skousen's book ("The Naked Capitalist") be purchased at the same time, as it offers a very helpful "Cliff's Notes" and summary of the larger work.
I give this book 5 stars for substance, 4 stars for personal bias, and 4 stars for being both too late, and too soon--to late to have saved us from what Derek Leebaert calls "The Fifty Year Wound," too soon to be centerpiece, as I would have it be, of a massive public intelligence digital project to nail down all the relationships and follow all the money.
Carroll Quigley's book is excruciatingly dull and filled with thousands of facts in very small print. I never-the-less recommend it for purchase because it may well be one of the more fundamental references of our time. Two other books that complement this one are Mike Rupert's "Crossing the Rubicon," and Jim Marrs' "Rule by Secrecy."
Now to my final point: others get nervouos when I begin to engage the "conspiracy literature," and I have to reiterate that the conspiracy literature is no more nor any less rife with bias and error than the conventional literature. See my reviews of John Perry's "Lost History" and Larry Beinhart's "Fog Facts." And if your really want to worry, read John Lewis Gaddis "The Landscape of History" on how inept and ignorant most of our scholars are, or the more conventional "Information Anxiety" by Richard Saul Wurman.
Quigley is the cornerstone for a public intelligence digital map that will emerge over the next few years. I anticipate that thousands of books and articles, including Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's "Gold Warriors" will all "make sense," and I believe they will make enough sense to warrant a massive re-possession of wealth such as has never before occured under non-violent circumstances. This book is revolutionary, but it is also before its time.
CLINTONS' MENTOR !.......2006-05-18
The late Prof. Carroll Quigley,of Georgetown University taught former President Bill Clinton ALL he knows-or so said Clinton at the 1992 Democratic convention.I've had this book for 30 years and its contents NEVER fail to amaze me.If yiu want to know the truth about the Cecil RHOADS sociey,Clinton was a member,or the anglophile Council on Foreign Relations(CFR),Bill was a menber of it too,READ THIS BOOK.Prof Quigley,who died in 1978,was an insiders' insider,he also had an influence on the late Sen. Joe McCarthy.The author of this review is very much a leftists.
1300 pages are too many.......2006-04-20
Quigley was a Georgetown professor who was permitted access for two years in the early 1960's to the private archives of the Committee on Foreign Relations, a Rockefeller internationalist organization that compliments the work of the Trilateral Commission and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
It is difficult to determine what the author is trying to communicate. There is no continuity to the book; nothing ties together Quigley's version of the past and of the future. It's like reading about the solar system and finding out that the conclusion of the matter is that the sun will expand and burn everything up. You are left wondering, what is the point?
We are left with the suggestion that the elite should continue to guide us in the same direction that we are traveling, but avoiding some of the monumental blunders that they have made in the past.
Quigley's version of history consists mostly of unquestioning repetition of propaganda. Quigley did a superficial job of analyzing history, and he is even worse at sociology. He touts Inclusive Diversity as our great strength and greatest gift. Perhaps he should have considered the aphorism, "Divide and conquer." The West, or any other empire, can only flourish when it concentrates on matters of common concern, not divisivness
Quigley does slightly better with economics and foreign policy, which are more in his area of expertise. He correctly observes that British and American "victories" in WWI and WWII resulted in the almost total destruction of international law. Quigley is in favor of the idea of continental blocs replacing national states. As globalization unfolds, Quigley exposes some of the hypocrisy and bungling, yet he inexplicably remains committed to the overall plan.
So, what is the point of all of this costly meddling? Quigley predicts success...and then failure. "We shall undoubtedly get a Universal Empire in which the U.S. will rule most of Western Civilization. This will be followed by a period of decay and ultimately by invasions and the total destruction of Western culture." Couldn't we save ourselves the trouble and just mind our own business?
Minding our own business is a concept based on the idea that the electorate is in control of the government, and that we have a choice. However, Quigley admits that international financiers influence and control governments. Quigley says that the internationalists, who prefer to remain in the background, should be known for their "valuable" contributions. What these contributions amount to is that they want world government, and they intend to cram it down everyone's throats.
As we slouch toward financial, industrial, and government monopoly the author reminds us of some of the casualties. "As economic enterprises have become larger and more tightly integrated into one another, the freedom, individualism, and initiative traditionally associated with the modern economy have to be sacrificed." Quigley acknowledges that in our future, "In general, there will be a very considerable modification of the areas and objectives of freedom in all societies of the world, with gradual reduction of numerous personal freedoms of the past."
To add to this loss of freedom, Quigley bemoans our loss of a spiritual mooring and suggests a return to the values of Christianity! His version of Christianity, of course. Still full of contradictions, Quigley cleaves to relativism rather than absolutes, approximations rather than final answers-not realizing that the adoption of these mindsets are what weakened the appeal of Christianity.
Finally, as we follow our present course, Quigley predicts an age of conflict characterized by class struggle, war, irrationality, and declining progress. Obviously, we're there now.
Rather than attack his sponsors, who are bringing us this New World Order, Quigley vents his frustration on the middle class. Quigley touts the moral superiority of both the rich and poor, but he asserts that the middle class consists of poorly-informed, neurotic, bourgeois, radical-right Republicans. Worst of all, they have Puritanical attitudes toward sex.
The many internal contradictions in this book indicate a confused mind or a shallow thinker. The author's history is mostly stale propaganda, spiced up with occasional pro-government cheerleading or tales of government boondoggles.
Maybe if Quigley had broken this monstrosity into several different books, he would have had something coherent to say. In this book, Quigley's conclusion is almost totally divorced from the rest of the book. This effort spanned 20 years, and possibly senility was sneaking up on the author.
A fascinating perspective of history !!.......2005-10-05
Quigley has done an immense job writing the history of the world from the elitist point of view. The winner, the powerful, and the wealthy usually write the history. Biased or not, based on evidence or not, they write the history or pay someone to do it for them, either way, they make it reality and a basis for the future of the world. As a reader, you must understand the history and the context in which it was written, in order for you to comprehend the dangers of the present and to predict the urgency of the future.
The tragedy in this book is in the Narcissism of Quigley and his oligarchy, and the vanishing hope is in the faith and the hands of the determined and decent people............
Amazon.com
Social phenomena happen, and the historians follow. So it goes with Google, the latest star shooting through the universe of trend-setting businesses. This company has even entered our popular lexicon: as many note, "Google" has moved beyond noun to verb, becoming an action which most tech-savvy citizens at the turn of the twenty-first century recognize and in fact do, on a daily basis. It's this wide societal impact that fascinated authors David Vise and Mark Malseed, who came to the book with well-established reputations in investigative reporting. Vise authored the bestselling The Bureau and the Mole, and Malseed contributed significantly to two Bob Woodward books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack. The kind of voluminous research and behind-the-scenes insight in which both writers specialize, and on which their earlier books rested, comes through in The Google Story.
The strength of the book comes from its command of many small details, and its focus on the human side of the Google story, as opposed to the merely academic one. Some may prefer a dryer, more analytic approach to Google's impact on the Internet, like The Search or books that tilt more heavily towards bits and bytes on the spectrum between technology and business, like The Singularity is Near. Those wanting to understand the motivations and personal growth of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, however, will enjoy this book. Vise and Malseed interviewed over 150 people, including numerous Google employees, Wall Street analysts, Stanford professors, venture capitalists, even Larry Page's Cub Scout leader, and their comprehensiveness shows.
As the narrative unfolds, readers learn how Google grew out of the intellectually fertile and not particularly directed friendship between Page and Brin; how the founders attempted to peddle early versions of their search technology to different Silicon Valley firms for $1 million; how Larry and Sergey celebrated their first investor's check with breakfast at Burger King; how the pair initially housed their company in a Palo Alto office, then eventually moved to a futuristic campus dubbed the "Googleplex"; how the company found its financial footing through keyword-targeted Web ads; how various products like Google News, Froogle, and others were cooked up by an inventive staff; how Brin and Page proved their mettle as tough businessmen through negotiations with AOL Europe and their controversial IPO process, among other instances; and how the company's vision for itself continues to grow, such as geographic expansion to China and cooperation with Craig Venter on the Human Genome Project.
Like the company it profiles, The Google Story is a bit of a wild ride, and fun, too. Its first appendix lists 23 "tips" which readers can use to get more utility out of Google. The second contains the intelligence test which Google Research offers to prospective job applicants, and shows the sometimes zany methods of this most unusual business. Through it all, Vise and Malseed synthesize a variety of fascinating anecdotes and speculation about Google, and readers seeking a first draft of the history of the company will enjoy an easy read. --Peter Han
Book Description
"Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors’ and Ford’s combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room that used to be
run
by the Grateful Dead’s former chef, and its employees traverse the firm’s colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.
The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world’s most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.
In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, “change the world” through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.
While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google’s quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database.
Readers will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft’s dominance and shake up Wall Street. Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders’ mantra: DO NO EVIL."
Download Description
David A. Vise is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller The Bureau and the Mole. Mark Malseed, who has contributed to the Washington Post and the Boston Herald, has won high praise for his research efforts on Bob Woodward’s recent books, Plan of Attack and Bush at War.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
A modern business story that is both unusual and topical.......2007-09-13
This founding and growth of Google is a fascinating story. While this book is very boosterish in its approach, that is fine. We understand what is going on and it is inevitable that the "dark side" of Google will come out elsewhere. Still, at its core and in the surrounding landscape, it is a pretty happy story.
Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford, wanted to download the Internet to his computer and thought he could do it quite easily and quickly. He met Sergey Brin, also a doctoral student at Stanford, was also interested in working with vast amounts of data, what could be learned from it, an how to organize it. Page came up with the PageRank algorighms that ranked the searches in ways that made them more useful to the person doing the search. (The name is a pun on Larry PAGE and web PAGE).
Stanford approached a number of organizations and venture capitalists to sell the technology, but there were no takers. So, Brin and Page dropped out and started their own company, which became Google. They have always focused on their corporate culture being innovative, oriented towards small teams, doing interesting things and only later worrying about how to make money with whatever comes of the research, and doing the best to live by their motto "Don't Be Evil".
They didn't follow the normal rules for raising money from the Venture Capital community, but were able to raise $25 million. They promised the VCs they would hire a CEO, but put it off for more than a year and when they did accept Eric Schmidt (because the three of them got along) they would not ever report to him nor would they cede control to him. When they finally had to go public (the VC stuff, again), they didn't follow the prescribed and traditional methods the investment banks use and only paid them half their usual fees.
Yes, going into China caused them real spiritual difficulties, and still does. And their goal of gathering all the information in the world and making it available does raise serious questions about personal privacy and freedom that they have not adequately addressed. However, they have great technology. I do use it and love Google Desktop. The book provides some tips about ways to use Google you may not know. Do you know that you can simply type in a math problem and it will solve it for you? That you can type in an address and it will pull up a map? Do you know about Google Book or Google Scholar? Take a look!
Way cool.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson
Excellent business book.......2007-08-15
Very interesting read. The author clearly loves Google but that aside, he covers the story from the start of Google as a research project at Stanford University through to their IPO and after. The best parts of the book for me was the incubation phase where they thought it was a good idea but needed to figure how to make money off it and turn it into a successful business. Lots of details on the key decisions made along the way but not too many details where you'd get bored reading it.
I appreciated how the author covered this as a business story covering the early investors who believed in the value of the idea to the immensely successful branding of the Google name. If business and technology companies in interest you, I don't think you'll be disappointed reading this book.
Great read!.......2007-08-13
This book was a true delight to read! This was so much more than just how two guys from college created a successful company. It was more than that. Those guys were turned away from Alta Vista, Excite, and Yahoo and had suffered disappointment after disappointment but never gave up. Their product (almost overnight) grew to be a massive empire once they got an investor to give $100k to their company. What I LOVED about this book was watching two easy-fun loving guys (who skateboard at their office in jeans and t-shirt) who continued to look to the future in the face of defeat. These guys never gave up and I, for one, was truly inspired after reading the book.
The back-story of how google came to be can be described as the underdog finally reaching the top and overtaking those who turned him down.
Great company summary.......2007-07-31
This book does a wonderful job of explaining that Google's success comes from great timing, great leadership, having a solution to a specific problem, and a bit of luck. A worthwhile read for sure.
Good Book.......2007-07-29
Dear All,
Its very good book, i have never seen before. its good and it needs really a very good time to read about it & to get in touch with that one.
My name is Mohammed Tantawi & in case of you need any thing to return back to me, please feel free & here is my E-mail as well.
[...]
Average customer rating:
- Intriguing analysis of the forces shaping the future
- Thought-provoking, irresponsible, and sometimes comically incorrect. But fun.
- Good Cliff note summary of current events
- Interesting read
- Past, Present, Future, Global, Local
|
Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World
Eamonn Kelly
Manufacturer: Wharton School Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Strategy & Competition
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Management
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Economic Conditions
| Economics
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
International
| Economics
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Economic Conditions
| International
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
General
| International
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Early Civilization
| Ancient
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| World
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Civilization & Culture
| Historical Study
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
| AIDS
| Abuse
| Adults
| Aging
| Children
| Class
| Communities
| Culture
| Death
| General
| History
| Leisure
| Marriage & Family
| Medicine
| Men
| Occupational
| Race Relations
| Religion
| Research & Measurement
| Rural
| Social Groups
| Social Situations
| Social Theory
| Suburban
| Urban
| Women
All Amazon Upgrade
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
Business & Investing
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
History
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
Nonfiction
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Business & Investing
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Nonfiction
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change
-
Shell Global Scenarios to 2025
-
Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence
-
The 86 Percent Solution: How to Succeed in the Biggest Market Opportunity of the 21st Century
-
The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World
ASIN: 0131855204 |
Customer Reviews:
Intriguing analysis of the forces shaping the future.......2006-12-18
Eamonn Kelly's predictions aren't as simple as those offered by some futurists, but that's because he's trying to be realistic about the complexity of "powerful times." And while Kelly's ideas aren't simple, they are clear. You can take any one of his predictions, such as the growing importance of water or the rise of consciousness about the sacred, and work through the implications for business and home life. In fact, Kelly explicitly asks readers to do so. His afterword poses a series of questions about how individuals and organizations are experiencing the changes he enumerates and invites readers to share their ideas within their organizations and on his Web site. Kelly emphasizes that humanity has just begun to feel the effects of many of the high-profile changes of recent decades, and that they haven't yet worked their way through the global economy. If the book has a weakness, it is that it's so focused on the United States. Kelly's treatment of Western ideals in general, and of U.S. military and political aims, seems to take America's self-image for granted. We recommend Kelly's book to policy wonks, executives involved in change management and, in general, anybody seriously planning for the future.
Thought-provoking, irresponsible, and sometimes comically incorrect. But fun. .......2006-10-13
Powerful Times has promise as you plow through the first handful of chapters. I've done quite a bit of future `ideating' mostly for product innovation to have concepts like `clarity vs craziness' - something we called, `synthesized sense-making' at work - and `technology acceleration vs pushback' - resonate with me. His arguments make sense and they feel like they're pointing to a powerful conclusion.
And then, something happens that makes you distrust everything you haven't researched yourself. For me, it was when that old bogie-man, "global warming", came out under the heading, `people and planet'.
I don't know if you have a poster of Al Gore in your dorm room or not, but when confronted with often-quoted-but-usually-disproved data points like polar ice melting (except where it's thickening), sea levels rising (plate tectonics, anyone?), and "NASA" saying the ten warmest years on record have all happened in the past twenty years (except for the entire decade of the 30's), I start to doubt everything else I've just read. (Take the time to read Sen. James Inhofe's speech on Capitol Hill from 9/25/06. He's the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the epw dot senate dot gov website - you'll have to hunt for it from there, as Amazon doesn't like reviewers to embed URL's. Most all of the current hype on global warming gets pretty clearly debunked here. And if that wasn't enough fun, pick up Michael Critchton's `State of Fear'. There's just too much hysteria against a backdrop of conflicting data and more conflicting politics to buy this hook, line and sinker).
After you fully defoliate the chapter on global warming, you are then faced with vignettes on how China is poised to offer the world advances in environmental conservation. Is it just me, or do you also recall hearing that a few hundred cities in China had air so bad you needed a catalytic converter just to breathe normally? Given China's record, it's hard to see anything done on an environmentally sustainable basis for its own sake.
So if I can't buy the stories on global warming or Chinese environmental stewardship, what am I to do with vignettes on the "African Renaissance" in scientific research? Frankly, I don't know whether there's any merit to this one or not, but his track record is getting a bit suspect at this point. (It's funny, I'm also reading Robert Young Pelton's `World's Most Dangerous Places', so the difference in perspective leads one to pause. I don't know about you, but my money at this point is on Pelton).
In "Prosperity and Decline", we're told that Brazil's "experiment in free trade" of violating patent laws on pharmaceuticals to provide AIDS drugs for free is a `vindicated' strategy because of lives saved and thus represents a bold new twist on free trade. Huh? I'm all for saving lives, but maybe the Brazilian government would pick up the tab next time? I take it that Hwa Wei's pirating Cisco software is excused because the domestic Chinese market now enjoys US-style router technology without all those pesky big invoices.
This is the second great red flag of the book - a huge disconnect in critical judgment. However, let's continue to suspend disbelief and plunge ahead with our story.
After two chapters that feel a bit out of place - governance and innovation - we get into three potential world scenarios, all of which are plausible in the author's view: "The New American Century", "Patchwork Powers", and "Emergence".
"The New American Century" assumes a greater American role in world affairs, with the ascendance of "American Values" on the global stage as the center piece. Free trade, democracy, the pursuit of happiness, individual freedom, etc., all presented against the sinister backdrop of American military might. You almost had us there.
"Patchwork Powers" operates under the assumption that the world always knew George W. Bush was up to no good, that the war on terror was illegal, and now "America has been put in its place". In other words, the Democratic National Committee platform. This scenario unfolds with regional powers - India, China, and China - taking a greater role, and Europe pretty much sinking beneath the waves. The superpower is dead. Long live the Junior Varsity.
"Emergence" illustrates the rise of the individual, flash-mobbing their way to political primacy, with nations crashing under their own bureaucratic hubris. Innovation sky-rockets for some reason, open source replaces intellectual property rights and terrorism runs amok. This is pretty close to hell, unless your vision of the future looks like "Blade Runner".
The number of not-very-subtle digs at the US and its president become a bit tedious. Sure, I'm biased -- I pay property taxes, travel internationally, and have a family, which makes me like things like stable currencies, the rule of law, economic growth. The irony, given the author's clear anti-American biases, is that "The New American Century" is the only optimistic scenario he presents. The reasonable idea that a "New American Century" with China beginning to take baby steps towards a leadership role, India being "open for business", and Middle East and Latin America (hopefully) finding their way towards real representative government and stable economic policy is not just possible, but hopefully our collective goal. The other scenarios all sound like a global retreat from where we are today - economically, politically, and socially.
The first half of the book gets four stars. The middle needed an editor. The last few get a two. I'll round up to a three.
Good Cliff note summary of current events .......2006-09-20
Airplane read. Book is current ... data based. Diverse news roundup with links to future implications. Can't recall any high concept take aways.
Buy it soon ... not much shelf life
Interesting read.......2006-09-06
Powerful Times is an examination of what the author presents as seven powerful dynamic tensions that will fundamentally reshape human life. What are these seven tensions? Some we are already seeing regularly in the news as the conflicts between the secular and the sacred. Others are also obvious like the tension between clarity and craziness. Still others become fascinating in the way the author develops them; like power and vulnerability, technology acceleration and pushback, intangible and physical economics, prosperity and decline, and people and planet. This is an in-depth exploration of the challenges and changes of governance and innovation. One of the more interesting ideas presented here are what the author sees as the three different scenarios for potential world orders that might evolve as a result of these tensions. This is a bold look at the forces molding our world as we know it and how they will change that world in the near future. Powerful Times is an interesting read and recommended to business and civic leaders at all levels.
Past, Present, Future, Global, Local.......2006-08-02
Author Eamon Kelly covers a lot of contemporary issues in "Power Times: Rising to the Challenges of our Uncertain World." Many current issues and circumstances are discussed: terrorism, technology governance, history, globalization, global warming, AIDS, oil dependence, and much more. Lots of stats and charts on a variety of topics that are different, but related to one another - and us.
At first this book takes us back in time. To the sixteenth century to Pandolfo Pretrucci, who had dialogues with Machiavelli. Soon after we travel to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ushered in a new national order that contains the basic model of what we have today: the nation-state. Author Kelly writes, "The importance of the nation-state has underpinned all subsequent centuries of European and world history. Certainly the nations-states are committed to achieving peace (not always successfully) and prosperity for their citizens....we have to think of the nation-state as the natural level and form of governance."
This is a worthy statement, as the entire concept of the recent nation-state has shaped our world so much. With this model comes the quest, organized greed and usurpation, and infinite conflict over territory and natural resources, the world over. A good move by Kelly to note the nation-state. No one else does anymore, save a history class on 17th Century Europe. This historical introduction is finished off with a massively profound quote from Pretucci: "The times are more powerful than our brains." (Huh?)
Chapters:
1. History Unleashed
2. Clarity and Craziness
3. Secular and Sacred
4. Power and Vulnerability
5. Technology Acceleration and Push Back
6. Intangible and Physical Economies
7. Prosperity and Decline
8. People and Planet
Section 2 - What if?: Changing for the Challenges Ahead.
Chapter 9. Governance
Chapter 10 Innovation
Section 3 - What's next? Scenarios of the Future
Chapter 11 Three Snapshots of the Future
Section 4 - So What?: Acting in an Era of Transformation
Chapter 12 Creating our New Future
Afterword: Using This Book in Your Life and Work.
My favorite sub-chapter: "Goggledygook and the Gorilla."
Many pithy quotes from famous folks are noted. One of my many favorites is, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its coat on." --Winston Churchill.
One concept of many in this book is a sub-chapter called "Reinventing Capitalism." Kelly notes Peruvian Economist Hernando De Soto's point in his book "The Mystery of Capital." De Soto states that the West has evolved to have an invisible yet essential society of laws, expectations, entitlements, and relationships that support the ownership of property. These conditions make the current structure of capitalism possible." And, De Soto sates that even most Westerners who live in these societies don't even understand how this system works, nor know much about it. Therefore, when the IMF, World Bank, and other agencies attempt to place these Western systems on foreign societies that don't have the underlying bases for these systems to begin with, the result if often not successful nor the most optimum way. De Soto's work has gotten attention and even Bill Clinton has noted his work in contemporary economics.
Many things I found interesting are: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the number of nanotechnology patents which have increased exponentially in the last 5 years, Moore's Law: the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months. And what is the most costly computer crime, of all computer crimes? Theft of Proprietary Info.
A wide variety of information here, and in the back of this book there is an open questionnaire, where you can answer some of the major questions on the topics presented and apply them to your own life, views, and work. Tons of things in this book that you can dabble into, and you can get further reading material from the citations.
Interesting was the "dilemmas for the world's only superpower." The dilemma in large part, has been caused by the world's only superpower. A check and balance is needed.
Great book.
Book Description
The definitive account of the Everests of mathematics--the seven unsolved problems that define the state of the art in contemporary math.
In 2000, the Clay Foundation announced a historic competition: whoever could solve any of seven extraordinarily difficult mathematical problems, and have the solution acknowledged as correct by the experts, would receive $1 million in prize money. There was some precedent for doing this: In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert proposed twenty-three problems that set much of the agenda for mathematics in the twentieth century. The Millennium Problems--chosen by a committee of the leading mathematicians in the world--are likely to acquire similar stature, and their solution (or lack of it) is likely to play a strong role in determining the course of mathematics in the twenty-first century. Keith Devlin, renowned expositor of mathematics and one of the authors of the Clay Institute's official description of the problems, here provides the definitive account for the mathematically interested reader.
Customer Reviews:
Seven of the greatest mathematical problems.......2007-05-13
If you want to know about seven of the most difficult unsolved math problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offers 1 million dolars a piece to whoever can solve them, this is the right book. Actually, we might talk about six unsolved problems since Perelman apparently solved the famous Poincaré conjecture.
A quite readable account for someone who has some training in math.
The best that could be done in a linear medium.......2007-01-19
This compromise between the desire to be comprehensible to a wide audience, and to describe aspects of highly abstract mathematics, works better than one might expect, but it is still a compromise. (I skipped years of school and took my Math degree at London University too immature to be successful.)
In my opinion, the only way this (book)/project could have been successful would have been for the Clay Institute to have commissioned a website with home pages for each of the problems, and a large web of explanatory pages for the various mathematical concepts involved.
There was one place I thought the author (no doubt overwhelmed with the purely mathematical difficulties of the task he had set himself) missed an opportunity to be clear. His Navier-Stokes equations describe a perfectly incompressible fluid. Clearly this is a mathematical abstraction - the speed of sound in such a fluid would be greater than the speed of light, indeed infinite. I think the whole thing would have been clearer if he had noted that the real question to be answered is "are the equations for an incompressible fluid a useful approximation to the behaviour of a real fluid, or does the attempt to approximate inevitably lead to nonsense?". Attempts to simulate multi-body gravitational interactions on a PC screen, for example, seem easy to program, but simple programs that calculate forces at an instant and then step positions forward a finite time, inevitably lead to all the particles eventually shooting off the screen, simply because two particles very close together at the instant have mometary huge forces on them, and the approximation that the force is constant over a step is then nonsensical. So far, the Navier-Stokes equations seem to fail in the same way. The question is, can this be fixed? At least that's my understanding, but it does not come through in this book.
Good reading for non-experts .......2006-09-09
It is probably impossible to satisfy everyone when writing a book about modern mathematics: no matter how good the book, some readers are bound to find it too primitive, while others will be hopelessly lost. The author seems to have tried to find the middle ground, perhaps a little on the "simple" side. A professional mathematician would probably find this book far too elementary; as a chemist, I found it educational. In places, it goes on and on about elementary concepts instead of progressing quickly to something more advanced. But overall, it was a good and stimulating reading that provided a glimpse of contemporary mathematics. Recommended if you are a non-mathematician with an interest in mathematics.
hard math made interesting..........2006-06-17
This week I finished reading The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin. It's a look into seven of the hardest, unsolved mathematics issues we have on our hands today. A prize for solving any of these puzzles has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute, offering one million dollars to anyone who solves or resolves any of them.
Devlin's book is a math populizer, and he does his best to illustrate the seven puzzles in question. They are:
1. The Riemann Hypothesis, which asks if there is a pattern to the distribution of the prime numbers, related to the zeta function.
2. Yang-Mills Theory and the Mass Gap Hypothesis, which would help us understand why the electron has mass.
3. The P vs. NP problem, which seeks to understand the types of problems that computers can analyze, by trying to determine whether problems can be broken up into two groups: easy to find an answer (P), vs. easy to check the answer (NP).
4. The Navier-Stokes Equations, which are differential equations governing fluid dynamics, but don't have known general solutions.
5. The Poincare Conjecture which is a toplogical problem for 4-dimensional objects, asking the question as to whether the surface of a four-dimensional sphere is simply connected.
6. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, which relates to whether a particular class of equations have solutions.
7. The Hodge Conjecture, which is a rather complicated piece of work in analytic geometry.
I have to be honest...while I followed the explanations given in the book for the last two, I know I have no hope of explaining them. The author does his best with the material, but he even admits that those two problems are rather obtuse.
All in all, it's a good book, for the mathematically inclined. The author provides good explanations for the problems, illustrating their histories, and the stories of those folks who originated the problems. Check it out...but only if math is your bag, baby.
An uneven account.......2005-11-28
As the author himself relays many times in the introduction, it is not the easiest task to explain to lay readers the forefront of mathematical research (or for that matter, the forefront of any academic discipline). However tried the author did, and in my opinion failed to convey the fundamental issues.
History is always a good place to start from when describing a problem. And the author excels in putting together the many strands of history leading up to the seven millennium problems. But history in itself cannot be sufficient in itself without describing the actuals. For instance in a chapter describing the Navier-Stokes theorem the author bluntly writes down the differential equation for users to read. Yes, specialists will relate to them, but for the lay readers? The chapter on Hodge's conjecture is even worse. The author acknowledges honestly there that he has no means to explain in lay terms the question in hand. In such case shouldn't the chapter be expanded to attempt to explain instead of just stating that there is no easy way? How else would writing a book on such topic be justified?
Even in the better chapters (the chapter on Riemann's hypothesis for e.g.) the disconnect between the good historical material and the lack of description for the real problem are evident. The book should either have been written for professional mathematicians or, if intended for general readers, should have limited its scope to things the author found clear-cut methods to explain. I admire the author's attempt, but as it is, the book appears uneven and incomplete.
Book Description
Second Edition, Revised and Expanded
Customer Reviews:
The best of the best in Israel's history books.......2007-10-10
Anybody who wants to know about the history of the State of Israel,you should read this book.
A Comprehensive Work.......2007-06-27
It is very difficult to accurately and comprehensively analyse this work.
The fact is that Sachar go's out of his way to be even-handed, which leads to a dilemma in itself.
The truth is that one cannot be objective in a conflict where it is clear to any fair-minded and honest observer who the agressors are and always have been: The Jews peacefully returned to their ancient land, and for nearly a century the Arabs have been trying to drive them into the sea.
There are times when I am uncomfortable with the author's particularly unfair treatment of the Jewish freedom fighters- the Irgun and Lechi- whom he labels as 'terrorists'.
At the same time, he honestly appraises the history of the situation as he see's it, and does not like the malevolent 'new historians' and revisionists, like Chomsky, Finkelstein, Said, Lenni Brenner and Israel Shahak, go back and rewrite history to suit their own destructive and malicious agenda against Israel.
This is an honest appraisal, in which the author strives to be fair.
Though his commentary is not always to my liking, he sticks to the facts, except in cases like the so-called massacre of Deir Yassin, where he has accepted the 'official' version' of events, despite clear evidence that there had been no deliberate killing of Arab civillians by the Jews.
The author begins by outlining the beginnings of the Zionist movement, the work of pioneers such as Moshe Hess, Leo Pinsker, Moses Montefiore, Achad Ha'am, Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky. He describes their strugles to adapt to harsh terrain, in the land which had flourished two thousand years before, when their ancestors lived there.
He describes how sucessive waves of Jews returning to the Land of Israel, struggled to adapt, often, to the homeland that was being restored.
He writes of the purchase by the Jews from Arab absentee landlords. The book describes the revival of the Hebrew language, thanks to the efforts of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and of the the long tradition of discrimination and dhimmni status of the Jews, in the Holy Land, and Arab countries under Islamic domination.
We learn of the origins of Communist hostility to Zionism and the Israeli people, of the originally warm attitude to Zionism by forward thinking Arab leaders such as King Feisal of Syria, and the bloody pogroms by Arabs on Jewish communities in the Land of Israel in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-1939.
The truth is that a very large part of the Arab hostility to Zionism, and the returning Jews originated in the fear among the Arab aristocracy in the Holy Land, and elsewhere in neighbouring lands, that the egalitarian spirit of the Jews, the democracy and emphasis, on social justice and democracy would influence the Arab masses, and therefore threaten the powerbases of the Arab elites.
We read of Hitler's ally and Jew-hater Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini, one of the original founders of Islamic jihad against the Jewish people, and his impassioned preaching of venom and genocide against the Jews.
Much of the Arab hostility and agression towards the Jews of the then named 'Palestine' was encouraged by intense propaganda directed at the Arabs by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, this at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees where fleeing from Nazi Germany to the Holy Land.
The book also highlights the Balfour Declaration and how the British later reneged, under Arab pressure, on the promises to the Jewish people of restoration to their ancient land.
Many of the British actively assited the Arabs against the Jews, and the British blocked the netry of hundreds of thousands of Jews, attempting to enter 'Palestine' as an escape from Hitler's infernos.
The book discusses the persecution of Jews in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt, and their mass expulsion from these countries after they fled from the Arab states, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs from the countries they had lived in for centuries.
The book describes the miraculous survival of the Jews of Israel, during the Second World War, and their victories against overwhelming odds in the War of Independence, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.
The book describes how before the Six Day War, the Arabs had surrounded Israel ,and openly issued hideous threats of genocide against all the Jews of Israel, forcing Israel to fire the first shots in order to survive(after Nasser had closed the Straights of Tiran) , and of the decades of infiltrations into Israel of marauding Arab terror bands killing Israeli men, women and children, including the massacres of Jewish children at Kiryat Shmona and Ma'alot, by the terrorists of the 'Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine'. And we also read of the cowardly attack by Arab states on Israel, that started the Yom Kippur War, and the unpreparedness of Israel's leadership that was scared to strike first for fear of upsetting world opinion.
This was a tragic mistake that imperilled the Israeli nation, and led to many unnecesary deaths of Israelis.
The book also describes the other triumphs of Israel: the absorbtion of millions of Jews, the struggles of the Oriental Jews (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East)for equality, the admirable building up of Israel's welfare state, and the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960's.
He also reflect on the conflicts within Israeli society and, contrary to the allegations by an earlier reviewer, focuses much on the issues of Israeli Arabs.
The trial of Eichmann brought home the horrors of the holocaust, and the lessons derived by the holocaust, by emphasizing the dangers inherent towards a Jewish minority living among a non-Jewish majority, and the need for an ingathering of Jews from all parts of the world in a homeland of their own.
During a break in the court sessions of Israel's thirteenth Independence day, David Ben-Gurion referred to the Eichmnn trial in a speech:
"Here for the first time in Jewish history, historical justice is being done by the sovereign Jewish people. For many generations it was we who suffered, who were tortured, who were killed-and were judged...for the first time, Israel is judging the killers of the Jewish people...and let us bear in mind that only the independence of Israel could create the necesary conditions for the historic act of justice".
Never again can catastrophy allowed to overtake the Jewish people, and the Jewish people subjected to genocide, especially not in their own homeland.
In a hostile world, much of which wants Israel destroyed, Israel must and will survive...with the help of the Allmighty.
Long live the State of Israel!
An excellent reference.......2005-02-14
This book does a fine job of supplying a detailed history of Israel. It is over 1000 pages, not even counting the index or the huge bibliography.
Sachar's idea is to tell us what happened and why. That does not mean taking sides. It does not mean saying if the people involved were reasonable or moral in choosing the sides they did.
I can understand this approach. We all wish that we could always view relatively current events from the perspective of those who could see which side was being greedy, which side was simply immoral, or which side was being impractical. But we can't, so Sachar simply reports what happened as best he can. And I don't see how I can ask for more than this.
In addition, the simple retelling of what happened and why tells us plenty about how wise or moral decision-makers were. Let me give one example. Sachar has a hefty section on the response to the UN Partition Resolution of November, 1947. Britain refused to gradually transfer authority to a United Nations commission, explaining that this would result in "confusion and disorder." Britain did everything possible to avoid cooperating with those in the UN or the Jewish Agency. The six UN commission members were made unwelcome. They "were soon reduced to foraging for food and drink. They accomplished nothing."
Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, simply regarded the Jews as enemies. As Sachar writes, Bevin claimed "that the whole Jewish 'pressure' was a gigantic racket run from America," that the Jews had stolen "half the place" (that is, half of the Mandate territory), and that "he would not be surprised if the Germans had learned their worst atrocities from the Jews." I think this ought to tell any perceptive reader plenty about Bevin.
On top of this, Sachar explains that Bevin and some important British officers were predicting an Arab military victory, and that the Arabs would have no difficulty taking over the whole country. Nowadays, some people appear to have forgotten all this and are pretending that everyone knew that the Arabs would be no match for the Jews, which is yet one more reason why we ought to read this book!
Sachar also tells us about the British swiping the entire contents of the Mandate treasury, to make sure the Jews got none of the money. At the same time, the British gave 300,000 pounds to the Supreme Moslem Council, an indirect subsidy of the Arab war effort. The British strictly enforced an embargo on Jewish immigration and Jewish weapons acquisition. Meanwhile, the British happily sold weapons to Iraq and Transjordan.
It is true that on April 1, 1948, the Jews decided to stop responding to Arab attacks in a purely defensive manner. With Jerusalem threatened, they did decide to take action to relieve the siege. But Sachar has already shown us that one reason the Jews were unable to try such a plan before then was that the British would have stopped them by force.
There is an enormous amount of information in this book. I recommend it to everyone who is interested in the topic, no matter what political views they may have.
Thorough and thought provoking.......2004-09-04
Very well-written, very informative, balanced view of the evolution and struggles that Israel has undergone.
I only wish it had an extra chapter to give similar perspective to the tumult of the past few years.
Great big book for a great little country.......2004-03-22
Besides being the heaviest book I've read in a very long time, A History of Israel, by Howard Sachar, is probably among the most useful anyone will find on that subject. Let's face it, in today's world the subject of Israel still comes up a lot, far more than one might expect for such a small country. And in an atmosphere in which fifty seven percent of people polled list Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, an educated person cannot afford to be ignorant on the matter.
Israel is a great country. And like all great countries (like most countries, actually) it has a right to exist. Its history extends back quite some time before its founding. If you doubt this, or know someone who does, than the early chapters on Zionism and Jewish migration into Palestine will be invaluable. Want to know just how the Jews came to inhabit the land? Was it a land grab? Theft? Acquisition by conquest? The answer is no, and you can get the details here.
What is Israel like? What is its culture? Economics? Daily Life? How about religion? They're Jews, but how devout are they? What power does the rabbinate have? What arts and sciences flourish, or fail to, in Israel? These are also covered, often, and in detail.
Israel has fought five major wars in its short life. Why? Who started them? How did Israel respond? Did these wars exist in a vacuum, or are they part of an ongoing antagonism against Israel from its Arab neighbors? What actually happened in the Six Day War? Just how did the occupation come to be? All of these issues are examined in detail.
Who runs Israel? What is the party structure? What do they believe? How does Israel relate to other countries, and how has this changed over the years? What about the United States? Is Israel really the fifty-first state? Again, these are all issues dealt with in detail.
The operative word here is detail. With over a thousand pages of small font text, Sachar can cover everything he wishes and go as deep as he desires. This is a history text, not a polemic essay. The point is to show Israel for what it is, avoiding the pitfalls that await anyone writing about the most controversial country every to exist. To the extant that Sachar has taken any sides, it would probably be with the Labor party and against the Likud party. As far as Israel's relations with the Arab countries go, he has stated things as they happen. It may be a surprise to many, but Israel has a really good record vis-à-vis the treatment of Arabs and they owe no excuses to anyone over their presence in the world.
So although the book is formidable and very, very long, it is clear and relevant to today's world. If you'd like to get past the shouting and name-calling and really find out about the country, this is the place to look.
Customer Reviews:
Dry history that we have seen before.......2007-09-06
Dry history book that contains little that has not been said before. Lacking in analysis of events.
Detailed analysis from emminent historian.......2000-07-28
Walter Laquer's "Europe in Our Time- A History: 1945-1992" is a supremely authoritative text, detailing a period in European history (and world history) quite unlike any other.
Europe was, to be blatantly honest, a mess after the Allies defeated the Germans and received their unconditional surrender. The problem was what to do after the end of the European War.
From here, Laquer speaks of all the important developments that occured in Europe, in most countries, in a very interesting prose-like fashion. Key concepts and terms our all explained sufficiently, and this book is similar to a novel in that it will keep you up at night, turning page after page, swallowing the history of Europe after 1945.
Highly recommended for undergraduate history students, and anyone remotely interested in how the modern world came about.
Book Description
The Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States indelibly shaped the world we live in today--especially international politics, economics, and military affairs. This volume shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the 20th century created the foundations for most of today's key international conflicts, including the "war on terror." Odd Arne Westad examines the origins and course of Third World revolutions and the ideologies that drove the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. towards interventionism. He focuses on how these interventions gave rise to resentments and resistance that, in the end, helped to topple one and to seriously challenge the other superpower. In addition, he demonstrates how these worldwide interventions determined the international and domestic framework within which political, social and cultural changes took place in such countries as China, Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua. According to Westad, these changes, plus the ideologies, movements and states that interventionism stirred up, constitute the real legacy of the Cold War. Odd Arne Westad is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2004 he was named head of department and co-director of the new LSE Cold War Studies Centre. Professor Westad is the author, or editor, of ten books on contemporary international history including Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003) and, with Jussi Hanhimaki, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (2003). In addition, he is a founding editor of the journal Cold War History.
Customer Reviews:
Outstanding Overview of a Neglected Topic.......2007-10-06
This fine book is devoted to a hugely important topic typically neglected in most discussions of the Cold War; the course and impact of the Cold War in the Third World. Most overview monographs on the Cold War concentrate on US-Soviet relations and/or the impact of the Cold War in Europe and Japan. Westad successfully attempts an overview and structural analysis of the Cold War in the Third World. Westad opens with a pair of summary chapters on the USA and Soviet Union leading up to the beginning of the Cold War. He then covers the early decades of the Cold War in the Third World concisely, and devotes much of the book to the last 2 decades of the Cold War, including detailed analyses of the events in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Based on a wealth of secondary sources and analysis of primary literature from both US and Soviet archives, the narrative is comprehensive, clear, and punctuated with thoughtful analysis.
There is a lot of surprising information. While many readers will be aware of US interventions in places like Guatemala and Iran, Westad's descriptions of the depth of US interventions in places like Indonesia and Brazil will come as a surprise. Similarly, his description of how the Soviet involvement in the Third World came to be seen as a crucial element of the legitimacy of the Soviet state goes a long way towards explaining why the events in Afghanistan had such importance. With respect to the battleground states of the various Third World countries where US and Soviet interventions took place, this is generally a series of tragic stories, usually involving considerable bloodshed and impoverishment.
Westad goes considerably beyond good narrative. Several well articulated themes run through the narrative. A basic concept is that the Cold War was driven by two competing ideologies about what should be the basis of modern society - American liberal capitalism and Soviet communism. Westad is very good on how ideological considerations consistently drove US and Soviet policy decisions, including the many cases where ideology led to gross misunderstandings of reality. Another important theme is the independent role of local elites in Third World countries. Over and over again, these elites or portions of them sought superpower support to pursue their own ends, often quite different from those of the superpowers. This led, for example, to the depressingly frequent US support of brutal dictatorships and the Soviet support of regimes who suppressed local communist parties. Westad is very good as well at showing how the Cold War involvement of the superpowers was entangled with decolonialization, another important theme. Both the US and Soviet Union presented themselves as, and made serious efforts to act as, modernizers. In a series of particularly ironic developments, both US and Soviet policies often mimicked the development policies of the imperial states they displaced.
My only substantial criticisms of Westad are his treatment of the origins of the Cold War. Westad presents US policies as rooted in a long history of US expansionism and capitalist ideology. There is considerable truth in this position but it ignores some of the specific circumstances of the 1940s. The failure of the post-WWI settlement seemed to demand a dominant international US role after WWII. Similarly, as Westad's own narrative shows, US fears of the Soviet Union were driven in good part by Stalin's aggressive and paranoid behavior.
Westad concludes by highlighting the frequently tragic consequences of US and Soviet intervention in Third World states, often transforming local conflicts into major disasters. The results of US and Soviet interventions in the Third World are among the most important results of the Cold War, and these results have been largely negative.
A good introduction.......2007-06-23
This is an important introduction to the topic of the Third World and the Cold War which has been gaining more study recently and deservedly so. For too long the history of the Cold War focused on foreign policy and Europe, but this book examines the doctrine of intervention, beggining mostly with Eisenhower in the U.S and increasing greatly with Khruschev and Brezhnev in the U.S.S.R. The book examines unique examples such as Cuba, Vietnam, Southern Africa, and Afghanistan. But it is also a sweeping account of this phenomenon, whereby many countries went from being colonized to being politiszed between the West and the Soviet Union. A very interesting study that seeks to show how the modern state of affairs in the world is tied up with the affects of the Cold War.
Seth J. Frantzman
The Third World and the Cold War.......2007-05-15
Westad presents a disturbing but comprehensive and balanced evaluation of U.S. and Soviet policies towards Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia in the 1946-1991. His research is exhaustive, and his conclusions are cautionary for American interventionists in the post-Cold War era.
Important and surprisingly readable new account of our times.......2007-04-01
Westad's book offers a new interpretation of the second half of the twentieth century, one that focuses on how the conflict between the US and the USSR-- and the division of the world into two halves-- played out in the Third World, and shaped and was shaped by the politics of those regions. The first two chapters are fairly heavy going, as Westad lays out sweeping statements about first the US, then the USSR, arguing that both countries developed around ideas that committed them to an almost evangelical form of statehood, of exporting their way of life. As he moves into the middle of the book, however, the story really takes off; he offers well-informed, fascinating case studies ranging from Angola and Ethiopia to Iran and Afghanistan. In every case, he illuminates the way in which the US and USSR offered only two sides on the playing field, and how people in these Third World countries responded by playing the superpowers off one another. One of the central processes that he brings to light is the way in which this situation eventually encouraged the rise of sectarian movements in many of those countries, including fundamentalist Islam, which appears here as a natural development from a generation who had watched their predecessors cast in with one of the two superpowers, and end up pawns in a global chess game. After finishing this book, I felt that I had an entirely new perspective on American history in the 20th century and better understood current-day issues from the rise of Islam to American support for Israel to the politics of central Africa. Certainly NOT a light read, but an invaluable one.
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
