Sunday, February 10, 2013

War, Schools, and the Future: This Week in the Book Pages

This week in the New York Times, Michael Beschloss reviews Paul Kennedy's Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (Random House).  Beschloss writes that "like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how little-known men and women at lower-levels helped win the war."  In doing so,"Engineers of Victory achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history."

Also in the New York Times, Andrew Bacevich reviews The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq (Pantheon), From George W. Bush to Barack Obama by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor.  It is, Bacevich writes an "instructive yet analytically shallow account of the Iraq war after the fall of Baghdad."  Read on here.  And, the New York Times has Michael Lind's review of Al Gore's The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (Random House).

In the Wall Street Journal Robert Merry reviews Coolidge by Amity Shlaes (Harper).  "The research is exhaustive, and the political and economic analysis sound," he writes.  You'll also find Isaac Chotiner's review of Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Bloomsbury) by John Darwin.

In the Washington Post, you'll find a review of Michelle Rhee's Radical: Fighting to Put Students First (Harper), and a review of Richard Seymour's Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (Verso)