The Great Experiment, by Strobe Talbott, is one in a broad family of books written by former executive branch officials about their experiences with power. These books often contain some theoretical noodling, bits and pieces of biographical detail, a few mildly interesting anecdotes within a jury-rigged “idea” that purports to hold the whole thing together. […]
Tag: books
In mid-2002, Benjamin Orbach traveled to Jordan. Orbach was 27 at the time, and wanted to improve his Arabic language skills. This is hardly unusual; a handful of Patterson students travel each year t
In early 1972 the heavy cruiser Newport News deployed to Southeast Asia. Newport News was one of the last of the big gun cruisers, commissioned in 1949 and carrying 9 8-inch guns with an automatic rel
Drew Gilpin Faust’s Republic of Suffering is about memory and the Civil War, but not in the conventionally understood fashion. Although Faust writes a bit about the memory of the war in the national narrative, she’s more interested in how the raw butchery of the war affected American culture on a micro level. The understanding […]
Feral Mom admits to having conversed from time to time about books she hasn’t actually read. [A]s I reflect on my literary sins, I have to admit that Pride and Prejudice is just the tip of this
Jurgen Rohwer and Mikhail Monakov wrote Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet in 2001, after the opening of Soviet archives had let considerable light onto Soviet Navy doctrinal and procurement decisions d
About he best I can say about this award is that winning it might be slightly more prestigious than emerging victorious from a mayonnaise-eating contest. Perusing the list of some of the finalists, we find the soaring literary contributions of Norman Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, Hugh Hewitt, Melanie Phillips, and Amity Schlaes — all of whom […]
Over the break I finished Vincent O’Hara’s U.S. Navy Against the Axis. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Pacific War, and in surface naval combat in the 20th centur