Review:Zakaria goes to great lengths to remind us that the words "democracy" and "freedom" are not in the least synonymous. He points to Hong Kong as one example: even before the famed "handover" of the city to Communist China, there was nothing even remotely approaching democracy in the city -yet its capitalistic success and famed tolerance for just about every manner of behavior, fashion, and style points to an extremely free society. On the other side of the coin there are countries like Germany, ... Read more

Review:Fareed Zakaria provides history and the insight needed to understand where we are and how we got here. Without that insight you cannot best understand where we are going. I believe he is spot on. It is time for us, Americans, to realize we are only a part of the whole. We are currently a big part of it but in the end it is the whole that matters. He is correct in that we failed by succeeding. The world learned what we wanted to teach them. We succeeded. Now they are our competition. If ... Read more

Review:The book offers some insight into Alinsky's methods, but at times it appeared to misstate and oversimplify them with slippery slope arguments. For example, the author talked about one of Saul Alinsky's plots against a clothing store that refused to hire black residents. The plan was to bus in thousands of black people and have them browse the store all day. The goal was to scare off the store's more racist customers, costing them profits and future business. The author tried to argue that th... Read more

Review:First, William Brennan's review below is far more eloquent than anything I could write, so I'll recommend that you read it before you read mine. I can't emphasize how impressed I was by this book. The fact that the author is both a soldier and a scholar provides this book with a truly unique perspective. The author is by no means a pacifist, but rather someone who really understands the costs of war and of entering into it without full societal committment and knowledge. The book's historical se... Read more

Review:-- Months before the latest Iraq war, the CIA recruited 30 Iraqi-Americans to visit their families and approach members of their families involved in that country's nuclear or WMD program. Every one of the thirty returned to America and reported the same message to their CIA contacts - the WMD programs had been dead for a decade. Their message was promptly ignored.

-- George Tenet was so incessantly busy cultivating his "good old boy" relationship with George Bush, he single-handedly allo... Read more

Review:Wow. This book explains quite well why we have the problems in America that we do. This was a bit of a tough read for me with all of the names, dates, facts, and figures. Hopefully everyone reads it so we can stop blindly following these people. Read more

Review:Having long been a fan of Hanson's clear, focused political columns, often linked in my Old Jarhead blog, I was delighted to stumble across one of his history books. In Carnage and Culture, Hanson considers European and American battles against non-western forces from Salamis to Tet. He links western military success to our institutions and culture, including the rights afforded citizens no where but the west, and the ability of free markets to create, innovate and build weapon systems. Some of ... Read more

Review:Here's a leader whose life is actually worth emulating. I don't generally feel that connected to people I don't know, but I can't imagine being on this earth once this incredible human being passes. A world without Jimmy Carter will not be as bright, but it would have been a lot worse without all the good he did for it.

On a funnier note, my favorite part of the book is toward the end when someone asks him if he ever took the time to relax in his life. His response was to write a book abo... Read more

Review:The Summer of 1787 is quite simply a well written book. The author very skillfully presents both sketches of the participant personalities and the
events that transpired. If you want to know about the significant elements of the Constitution and how they were included, this is the book to read.
The author excels at explaining the impact of the subject of slave states
versus free states. What I wanted to do as a reader was visit the events
of the Constitutional Convention, learn what ... Read more