About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Steve Coll
Positive The New Statesman The story Coll presents is devastating, yet the presentation is so painstaking and low-key that there are relatively few gotcha moments ... The story of America and Iraq is epic in its dimensions, of which Steve Coll has provided the most comprehensive blueprint thus far.
Gary J. Bass
Rave The Washington Post [A] comprehensive, landmark and riveting book, which is both a sickening record of atrocities and a legal, hairsplitting analysis, as the judges argued over natural law, aggressive war, chain of command and more ... Bass employs the complexities of the trial as a fulcrum to sketch a wide canvas.
Paul Kennedy
Rave The Washington Post ... packed with minutiae ... Daunting as these facts may be, the book makes for enjoyable reading, owing to the author’s easygoing style, as if he knows all this off the top of his head and is talking to you by a log fire. Kennedy is an academic who does not write like one; he writes a story, not a treatise. It is a story enhanced by Marshall’s exquisite artwork, in which the depiction of one gray warship after another never gets monotonous, retaining their fascination throughout ... That story holds chilling echoes of our own time and our own great-power struggles.
Samuel Moyn
Positive The New York Times Book Review [Moyn] he takes the reader on an excruciating journey, in incisive, meticulous and elegant prose, about the modern history of making war more legal, and in effect sanitizing it so that it can continue forever ... Moyn puts the whole issue in a tough, pragmatic perspective ... The yearning to avoid war and yet make it more humane will therefore continue, rendering Moyn’s book timeless.
C J Chivers
Positive The New York Times C. J. Chivers, a senior writer for The New York Times and a former Marine infantry officer, begins his new book with a description of an American weapon, equipped with GPS sensors and a guidance system, hitting \'precisely the wrong place\' and killing and mutilating a family of women and children on the Afghan steppe as a consequence. But Chivers’s narrative has only begun to slam you in the gut; later on, the author captures the psychological effect the errant bomb has on the Marines at the scene. Indeed, because of the way the stories and characters spool into one another with mathematical intensity, and the second-by-second in-your-face descriptions of prolonged battles from a sergeant’s eye view, The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq could be the most powerful indictment yet of America’s recent Middle East wars.
Max Boot
Rave The Wall Street Journal The Road Not Taken is an impressive work, an epic and elegant biography based on voluminous archival sources. It belongs to a genre of books that takes a seemingly obscure hero and uses his story as a vehicle to capture a whole era ... Mr. Boot’s full-bodied biography does not ignore Lansdale’s failures and shortcomings—not least his difficult relations with his family—but it properly concentrates on his ideas and his attempts to apply them in Southeast Asia. In Mr. Boot’s judgment, the American war there 'would have been more humane and less costly' if McNamara, Westmoreland and other American officials had taken his advice. The Road Not Taken gives a vivid portrait of a remarkable man and intelligently challenges the lazy assumption that failed wars are destined to fail or that failure, if it comes, cannot be saved from the worst possible outcome.
Graham Allison
Rave The Wall Street Journal ...a brief but far-reaching book in which potted history is incisively deployed ... One of the many strengths of Destined for War is the restoration of the late Samuel Huntington’s 'Clash of Civilizations' theory, disparaged in the mid-1990s but subliminally gaining force by the day. Mr. Allison approvingly paraphrases Huntington’s notion that 'the Western myth of universal values' is 'not just naive but inimical to other civilizations, particularly the Confucian one with China at its center.'
Andrew J. Bacevich
Mixed The Wall Street Journal ...a deft and rhythmic polemic aimed at America’s failures in the Middle East from the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency to the present ... This is how the book goes. It sweeps you along, unless you are willing to stop and say: Hey, wait a minute, that’s not the whole truth. Nevertheless, there is wisdom aplenty in one of Mr. Bacevich’s key propositions, which is that in all the decades that the Americans sent troops to fight in the Middle East there was far too little appreciation of the region’s deeper problems.
Michael V. Hayden
Mixed The Washington Post Hayden is at his best not when he is attacking or defending, but when he is simply explaining the challenge of an intelligence professional in the postmodern era ... This is a pessimistic book, but while policymakers tend to be optimists, intelligence agents trend toward the reverse. As former CIA director Robert M. Gates once said, when an intelligence analyst stops to smell the flowers, he quickly looks around for the hearse.