Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, edited by Francis Fukuyama.
Worth perusing. Learned a lot in the opening chapter by Fukuyama and two historical pieces. One great article on Afghanistan by Frederick Starr. Diamond's stuff on Iraq was disappointingly conventional--nothing stood out.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
Very good but not as spectacular as promoted. His excerpt in the Post gave you everything you needed from the book.
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks.
Ricks has a rocky reputation among many military officers for being a bit devious. This book is spectacular though. Eminently readable. Hugely informative. A real education. I was deeply impressed. It deserves any and every award it got.
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla.
I had read his piece in the NYT Mag and was hugely impressed. The book impressed me less for the purposes of research: read the opening chapter and skip the rest. Personally, though, I liked the rest even if none of it is useful to me. I learned a ton about religious thinking throughout time, even if he didn't organize his overarching theories well in the book.
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.
I met Rod right after my TED talk and hooked he and Ori up with my agent, Jennifer Gates. This book is a nice, accessible businessy volume that's chock full of anecdotes. The delineation of rules and characteristics stands out. You can peruse the volume quickly. Not a big pull of stuff for me but a nicely concentrated one that should help in one particular chapter.
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Comments (1)
Sean takes me to task privately for abusing the word "peruse," which I do, in a conventional sense.
It means to read deeply and intensely, so it's not something you can typically do quickly.
When I use the word, I mean "reading for deep meaning," which I think can be done either fast or slow. To peruse something quickly, if that's possible, means the best stuff is easily identifiable by italics or whatnot, like the Starfish book is, or that the author really cranks get opening para sentences (some do, some don't).
But Sean's right. I do abuse the word's meaning.
Posted by Tom Barnett | December 29, 2007 9:29 AM