Robert Penn Warren
All The King's Men
1946
A beautifully constructed Pulitzer Prize winning portrait of American politics and corruption. Governer Willie Stark is almost a premonition of Nixon a full 20 years before he rose to power and a quarter decade before his fall (partly through the work of this book's near namesake).
Every page is poetry, every character fully described. Penn Warren's language brings the book's American South setting alive, and allows Willie Stark to seduce you though his actions are so abhorrant, and in this way Penn Warren created a wholly believable politician.
Favourite Stark quote, "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud."
I wonder if Nixon had this in mind when he sent out his "ratfuckers".
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Freedman, A Choice of Enemies
Lawrence Freedman
A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
2009
Concise and largely objective overview of 30 years of American foreign policy in the Middle East, by London King College's professor of war studies. Tellingly, for a concise overview, it still runs to around 600 pages of dense text, but it would be impossible to do justice to the book's remit in any less.
Freedman focuses his thesis on the crucial year 1979 - the year of the Iranian Islamic revolution, Saddam's rise to power in Iraq and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan - and lets the history unfold from there.
The book is a damning indictment of America's wavering policies in the Middle East, where allies swiftly become enemies. Much is said about the instability of Middle East politics, but as Freedman's book shows Mideast leaders are equally adept at exploiting the inherent instabilities in America's political system.
Witness how Khomenei waited until Carter left the White House, almost to the second, before he released the Iranian Embassy hostages, or how successive Israeli governments maintain their occupation of the West Bank and Golan by mobilising the powerful US Jewish-lobby and confounding successive Presidents with empty "accords" and aimless "road maps" to peace.
A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
2009
Concise and largely objective overview of 30 years of American foreign policy in the Middle East, by London King College's professor of war studies. Tellingly, for a concise overview, it still runs to around 600 pages of dense text, but it would be impossible to do justice to the book's remit in any less.
Freedman focuses his thesis on the crucial year 1979 - the year of the Iranian Islamic revolution, Saddam's rise to power in Iraq and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan - and lets the history unfold from there.
The book is a damning indictment of America's wavering policies in the Middle East, where allies swiftly become enemies. Much is said about the instability of Middle East politics, but as Freedman's book shows Mideast leaders are equally adept at exploiting the inherent instabilities in America's political system.
Witness how Khomenei waited until Carter left the White House, almost to the second, before he released the Iranian Embassy hostages, or how successive Israeli governments maintain their occupation of the West Bank and Golan by mobilising the powerful US Jewish-lobby and confounding successive Presidents with empty "accords" and aimless "road maps" to peace.
Woodward & Berstein, The Final Days
Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
The Final Days
1976
Day by day account of the last days of the Nixon regime, brought down in part by the authors' Washington Post reports.
Less breathless and immediate than All The President's Men, which was written in the white hot heat of Watergate, this is more of a dry historical account.
The reversal of writing credits from its predecessor (ATPM was credited to Bernstein & Woodward) suggests Woodward did most of the legwork while cultivating the Washington contacts that would keep him in print for the next three decades, while the more impetuous Bernstein was busy eating out on his new found fame.
This book is less Nixon: My Part In His Downfall and more The History of the Decline and Fall of the Nixon Empire.
The Final Days
1976
Day by day account of the last days of the Nixon regime, brought down in part by the authors' Washington Post reports.
Less breathless and immediate than All The President's Men, which was written in the white hot heat of Watergate, this is more of a dry historical account.
The reversal of writing credits from its predecessor (ATPM was credited to Bernstein & Woodward) suggests Woodward did most of the legwork while cultivating the Washington contacts that would keep him in print for the next three decades, while the more impetuous Bernstein was busy eating out on his new found fame.
This book is less Nixon: My Part In His Downfall and more The History of the Decline and Fall of the Nixon Empire.
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