January 8, 2013
Dear Friends,
The first principle in the presentation business, written or oral, is simple: Never begin with an apology.
So we won’t.
However, be forewarned: this will not be quick. You see, when you set out to review multiple books in one ‘sitting,’ length -- and reader fatigue – is inescapable.
But because outstanding artists and scholars have treated us to some marvelous thinking and writing during 2012, we wanted TMR readers to share the wealth.
Blockbusters
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
Okay, we’re taking chronological license here. Isaacson’s remarkable biography of Jobs was published in late 2011, but continues to be on best-seller lists, and may just be among the dozen finest biographies of the last century, along with Isaacson’s accounts of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
Isaacson is Jobs’ Boswell, and has given us Exhibit A for what a ‘no holds barred’ biography can be: the author held back nothing, and the subject asked for no control over what was written. The result is an encyclopedic, unvarnished, and astonishing account. If you’re interested in probing the mind and character of a man who revolutionized six different businesses – personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing (and retail stores, some would suggest) – and who was neither trained in or for any of these, Isaacson has given readers the record.
“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.”
Thanks to Isaacson, this isn’t simply a biography about a man; it’s a study in innovation, leadership, risk-taking, strategic focus, and a touch of madness and magic just for good measure.
The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
Reader Beware: this is not a ‘beach book.’ Nor is it a book for every one. Though Haidt might question this thought, I’d recommend listening to an illuminating conversation he had early last year with Bill Moyers -- http://billmoyers.com/segment/jonathan-haidt-explains-our-contentious-culture/ -- or to a 2008 TED Talk that deals with much of the same subject matter -- http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html -- that fills the pages of his path finding work.
In each of the three major sections of The Righteous Mind, Haidt offers an intellectual anchor:
• Part I: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second (didn't we just read that?)
• Part II: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness
• Part III: Morality binds and blinds.
In his conclusion, Haidt offers counsel to us all, and particularly to those who govern and legislate:
“This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult . . . to connect with those who live in other matrices which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations.
“So the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality or in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest.
“We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.”
If you happen to have a connection to Messrs. Obama, McConnell, Reid, Boehner, Cantor and Madame Pelosi, you might want to share this with them.
America in the World
The World America Made, Robert Kagan
Few scholars can think their way through complexity with the agility and clarity of Bob Kagan, and even fewer do it with his welcome capacity for brevity and his wit.
As his friend David Brooks reminds us, Bob Kagan writes two kinds of books – very large ones (A Dangerous Nation) and very small ones (Of Paradise and Power, The Return of History and the End of Dreams) and now this one.
It begins with an apt metaphor:
“In the Frank Capra classic 'It’s a Wonderful Life,' George Bailey gets a chance to see what his world would have looked like had he never been born. It would be nice if we could do the same for the United States, to see what the world would have looked like had the United States not been the preeminent power shaping it for the past six decades, and to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline, as so many nowadays predict.”
And concludes with a stark observation:
“The lesson of the twentieth century, perhaps forgotten in the twenty-first, is that if one wants a more liberal order, there may be no substitute for powerful liberal nations to build and defend it. International order is not an evolution, it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others – in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it.”
Kagan comes to this thesis neither as an apologist for American power, nor an advocate for expeditionary campaigns in foreign lands. He is neither John Quincy Adams redux – “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor a neo-Wilsonian bent on a new “Fourteen Points” agenda. He’s an historian reporting the facts -- a kind of Sgt. Joe Friday look at ‘America in the World’ -- “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski
And now comes the advocate and the architect for an America that sustains its commitments to global leadership, all in the context of a world where the center of gravity is seen shifting from west to east, and from Atlantic to Pacific.
“The world needs an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, strategically deliberate, internationally respected, and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East.”
In less than 200 pages, Brzezinski covers the globe, leaving no region unexamined, while outlining America’s primary objectives in each part of the global order. ‘Zbig,’ as he is known to friends, is an inveterate list-maker: six critical U.S. liabilities, six assets; eight geopolitically endangered states; seven possible threats of rising Asian nationalism(s); five major threats to Chinese social stability; and six major U. S. objectives in its relationship with China. And that’s not all.
But few scholars have Brzezinski’s comprehensive grasp of world history, his hands-on political experience (as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser,) and his incisive strategic insights that quickly lead to specific policy recommendations.
His concluding observations:
“Thus, America’s central challenge and its geopolitically imperative mission over the next several decades is to revitalize itself and to promote a larger and more vital West while simultaneously buttressing a complex balance in the East, so as to accommodate constructively China’s rising global status and avert global chaos.
“America must adopt a dual role. It must be the promoter and guarantor of greater and broader unity in the West, and it must be the balancer and conciliator between the major powers in the East.”
It recalls Woody Allen’s observation of some years ago:
“It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.”
No One’s World: The West, The Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn, Charles Kupchan
In a town where marquee players like Brzezinski and Kagan get lots of ink and airtime, there are a handful less well known to the outside world who are equally valued for their policy contributions on foreign policy and national security issues -- and Charlie Kupchan is one of the very best.
Where many prognosticators see the world tilting toward Asia, away from Europe and the United States, Kupchan sees it in less certain and more nuanced terms:
“The emerging landscape is one in which power is diffusing and politics diversifying, not one in which all countries are converging toward the Western way. Indeed, the world is on the cusp of a global turn.
“The twenty-first century will not be America’s, China’s, Asia’s, or anyone else’s; it will belong to no one. The emergent international system will be populated by numerous power centers as well as multiple versions of modernity. For the first time in history, an interdependent world will be without a center of gravity or global guardian. A global order, if it emerges, will be an amalgam of diverse political cultures and competing conceptions of domestic and international order.”
Kupchan also ventures some observations that depart from what might be called a ‘consensus-of-sorts’ among the global order experts, and which with the passage of time since finishing his book, seem particularly insightful:
“As the middle class expands in the Muslim world, religion may well strengthen, not lose, its influence over political life.
“What likely lies ahead is an Islamic brand of modernity, not the secularization of Islam.”
And finally:
“The bottom line is that states around the world are on very different political trajectories. The divergence is a function of profound variation on many dimensions, including political culture, path of socioeconomic development, and religion . . . The next world will not march to the Washington Consensus, the Beijing Consensus, or the Brasilia Consensus. It will march to no consensus. Rather, the world is headed toward a global dissensus.”
Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, National Intelligence Council
A slight departure from the norm – not a book, per se, but a report from “The NIC,” their fifth and, arguably, most comprehensive. The list of scholars, practitioners, universities, think tanks, science labs, and other civil society organizations around the world who contributed to this work takes up three pages, and ‘first among equals’ is the Atlantic Council of the United States, which organized a series of workshops on key issues around the globe, and whose leadership – Fred Kempe, CEO, Barry Pavel, director of their Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security, and their ACUS colleagues – merits special mention.
If you’re not inclined to a rich fare of global governance, move on to the next section. But if a thoughtful and analytical consideration of global megatrends, game-changers, and potential world scenarios is of interest, the NIC report is ‘must reading.’
http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-trends
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, Rajiv Chandrasekeran
Remember Afghanistan? If you’ve managed to put it on the back burner, the Washington Post’s senior correspondent and associate editor, and author of the highly-acclaimed Iraq account, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” puts it back on the front with the heat on high and laser beam focus on what’s in the pot.
Chandresekran combines uncommon literary skills with prodigious reporting habits, and the result is an eminently readable and enormously depressing tale of mismanagement, or worse.
“What happens, I asked the general, if we win Helmand but lose Afghanistan” ‘That would be just fine for the Corps,’ he said.
“As I walked down the dirt road in Lakari, I contemplated how it was that more than two hundred Americans had found themselves in this strategically questionable patch of Afghanistan. Why weren’t they in the districts abutting Kandahar or in parts of the east besieged by the Haqqani network? This wasn’t an issue of grand strategy. Even if Karzai hadn’t been a loose cannon and Pakistan hadn’t provided sanctuary to Taliban commanders and the White House hadn’t blanched at the hundred-billion dollar annual tab, Obama’s vast increase in American troops and reconstruction dollars would still have amounted to a missed opportunity in Afghanistan. The reason wasn’t to be found in Kabul or Islamabad. It was in Washington: The American bureaucracy had become America’s worst enemy.
“The Pentagon was too tribal . . . The generals were too rigid . . .Top commanders refused to break apart enough infantry units to create teams of mentors . . . The grunts committed too many unforced errors . . . murdering civilians, disrespecting the Koran, mistreating Taliban corpses . . . The war cabinet was too often at war with itself . . . Those rivalries were compounded by stubbornness and incompetence at the State Department and USAID.
“All told, I spent three years observing Americans attempting to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan . . .
“I kept hearing promises of how it all would be fixed. New strategies. New teams of officers and diplomats. New requests for money. A new man in the White House. But none of it remedied the core problem: Our government was incapable of meeting the challenge. Our generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Our uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries and go-it-alone agendas. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted.
“For years, we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans. We should have focused on ours.”
In fairness, I’ve been assured by one of the country’s most respected military scholars that Chandrasekeran has it wrong, particularly in his searing criticism of the Marine Corps’ ‘our-way-or-the-highway’ demeanor. Perhaps so, but I fear that history is on Chandrasekaran’s side.
Inside America's Political Cauldron
Three books, among several other excellent selections, seemed to us to best capture the nature of the country’s profound political funk, and to provide both supporting evidence and substantive insight into the trap created by our seemingly intractable political polarization. Each was reviewed in spring and summer of 2012, and can be found at The Mitchell Report’s site: themitchellreport.typepad.com
Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, E. J. Dionne, Jr.
Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, Edward Luce
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Taken together, the questions raised by these scholars and journalists continue to be the most salient among a long list of concerns by a growing number of people around the globe, some who simply wonder, others who wonder out loud: “Is the glass that holds America’s ‘governance juice’ half-full or half-empty?”
Fiction Anyone?
Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd
Boyd is a master storyteller, one of England’s best – A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham awards; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and several others.
In this sophisticated espionage novel that moves about from Vienna to London to the World War I battlefields of France, to Switzerland, and back, readers are treated to a brilliantly woven fabric of physical, psychological, and emotional journeys, featuring a young British actor, Lysander Rief, who goes to Vienna in 1913 to seek a psychoanalytic cure for a sexual dysfunction, and whose life takes a series of unconventional and unanticipated turns.
Add to that, prose that always beckons the reader, from beginning:
“It is a clear and dazzling summer’s day in Vienna. You are standing in a skewed pentangle of lemony sunshine at the sharp corner of Augustiner Strasse and Augustinerbastei, across from the opera house, indolently watching the world pass by you, waiting for someone or something to catch and hold your attention . . .
“And then you see – to your right – a young man striding out of the Hofgarten park. He is in his late twenties, almost handsome in a conventional way, but your eye is drawn to him because he is hatless, an anomaly in this busy crowd of Viennese folk . . .
"At the entry to Michaeler Platz he stops abruptly, pauses, stares at something stuck to a hoarding and then continues on his way, briskly, as if her's running slightly late for an appointment. You follow him around the square and into the Herrengasse -- the slanting sundays picking out the details on the grand, solid buildings, casting sharp, dark shadows on the caryatids and fries, the pediments and cornices, the balusters and the architraves . . ."
To end:
“You are standing shivering in the angle of two walls in Archer Street, peering out, trying to discern the late-night world go by, your attention half-caught by the small crowd of enthusiastic theatre-goers waiting with their programmes for an autograph as the cast of Man and Superman leaves the stage door after the show . . .
“The light is switched off but you see that the door opens one last time and a man appears with a raincoat and a hat in his hand. He looks up at the opaque night sky, checking on the dismal weather. And you will probably recognize him as Mr Lysander Rief, who is playing the part of John Tanner . . . Lysander Rief looks tired – he looks like a man who is not sleeping well. So why is he quitting the theatre so discreetly, the very last to leave?"
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
Ah, those Brits. And their prizes – Man Booker, Somerset Maugham, Whitbread.
More than one review of Barnes’ book – about the life of Tony Webster, whom we meet as a young man and then follow into his later years -- suggests that it be read in ‘one sitting,’ given its length (160 pages, and small pages at that) and the compelling nature of its content, which Barnes’ describes in an interview as ‘an exercise in memory,’ and ‘a search for the evidence of the things that happened in your life.’
Quite early in the book, Tony Webster’s boyhood chum, Adrian Finn, makes this learned observation:
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,” and when asked his source for the quote, attributes it to “Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He’s French.”
Turns out, again from an interview with Barnes’, that there is no Lagrange (French for, ‘the barn,) but that it describes the author’s sensibilities about history and memory. And from that point on, we read:
“We were turning our past into anecdote.”
“Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent.”
“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
“For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions -- resentment, a sense of injustice, relief -- and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else, the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction.”
Barnes concludes with this:
“You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”
Postscript
Only a few will have made it this far, and for that we offer one of George Bernard Shaw’s finest ad libs, which you may find useful the next time someone rings your phone or doorbell on behalf of some well-meaning cause:
George Bernard Shaw answered a knock at his door one day and was greeted by a couple who announced gravely:
‘Good morning, we are Jehovah’s Witnesses.’
‘Good morning,’ said Shaw. ‘I’m Jehovah. How are we doing?’
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