I
wonder whether the war in Ukraine will be remembered as a folly of Western
hubris or a Churchillian stand against another European warmonger.
The experts
believe the latter, but then so did the best and brightest minds in the sixties
when, first under Kennedy and then Johnson, the United States leadership believed
that victory was just around the corner, just one more troop surge, just one
slight tweak to the strategy, just one more South Vietnamese leadership change
away from victory.
Reading through Robert McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam
War offers a fascinating insight into the challenges of wartime decision-making and possibly some reminders for today’s decision-makers.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER. The definitive insider's account of American policy making in Vietnam.
"Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong? This is what Robert McNamara does in this brave, honest, honorable, and altogether compelling book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Written twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's controversial memoir answers the lingering questions that surround this disastrous episode in American history.
With unprecedented candor and drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, McNamara reveals the fatal misassumptions behind our…
This
is the first of a four-part series that had me hooked from the first chapter. It is a science fiction book that seems so absurd yet so tantalizingly possible.
Bob is humanity’s last hope, and somehow, Bob, an otherwise unremarkable
fellow, manages to become the prototype sentience of the future of the human
species.
I love space opera, and this is space opera on an enormous scale from
an author with an enormous imagination. It’s such an easy read that it works well
as a palate cleanser between more intense non-fiction books.
Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first…
This
is a Nobel Prize for Literature-winning book that is a must-read for historical
fiction enthusiasts.
Spanning some four hundred years, the centerpiece isn’t
the usual high drama running across generations of a family but rather a bridge,
the bridge over the river Drina.
The book is a surprisingly easy-to-read novel
that follows periods in the lives of the peasants in a Bosnian town whose lives
were marked by the bridge.
Through the telling of these stories, Andric subtly
introduces the reader to the empires, religions, and cultures of the Balkans.
In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of World War I.
The bridge spans generations, nationalities and creeds, silent testament to the lives played out on it. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest…
What happens to aid projects after the money is spent? Or the people and communities once the media spotlight has left?
No Dancing, No Dancing follows the return journey of a former aid worker back to the site of three major humanitarian crises—South Sudan, Iraq, and East Timor—in search of what happened to the people and projects. Along the way, he looks for answers to how we can better respond to the emerging global humanitarian crisis.
Meeting young entrepreneurs striving to build their businesses, listening to tribal leaders give unvarnished views of foreign aid, or negotiating the release of a kidnapped colleague, this riveting work brings the reader into the global humanitarian crisis while engaging with questions of cultural imperialism, Western aid models and foreign interventions.
