So, What Are You Reading?

I'm about 100 pages through Under the Gun in Iraq: My Year Training the Iraqi Police (2007) by Robert Cole.

I'd assumed without checking when I bought it that it would be about the US Army Military Police, who are frequently called on to be trainers of host nation police forces. Instead, Cole was a retired American police officer who was hired by DynCorp International to train as a military contractor for $350 a day. Unfortunately Cole comes off as boorish and culturally insensitive as you'd expect someone dropped into Iraq after 3 weeks of "boot camp."

He routinely describes violating traffic laws with incessant speeding, harassing motorists and even threatening to kill people for walking too close to his vehicle, in what I'm pretty sure would be murder even in the relative lawlessness of Iraq. He makes no effort to understand the cultural differences between himself and the locals, chalking them up to incompetence or low intelligence. The book is leaving a bad taste in my mouth, but I'm holding my breath that it gets better.

 

I finished the book...not any better. Ugh.

 

The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid (2017) by Will Bardenwerper

This is a very interesting character study of Saddam Hussein, part-biography and part-retelling of the time that the "Super 12" as they became known spent guarding him.

Lots of insights into Hussein and what led him to murder and cruelty.

And interesting that many of those who guarded him grieved him and even experienced PTSD following his death.

 

A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power (2015) by Paul Fischer

Had this one on my shelf for a while. It was a good read. It mixes a biography of Kim Jong-Il with the history of the abduction of Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee.

 

Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis by Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman and Robert Gallucci (2004).

An exhaustive review of the 1994 nuclear crisis and the resulting Agreed Framework. This book is 400 dense pages, covering every single interaction over 18 months and beyond.

I appreciated the lessons learned section at the end with information on how to negotiate with North Korea. The 3 authors were all intimately involved in the crisis so they bring their lived experience to the book.

A good read.

 

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren. Original Copyright is 1940.

 

How can you read it if you don't know how to read a book already?

 

Hamilton by Ron Chernow ( Light reading at night). The musical, which I have not seen, is based on this book)

 

I guess it's like driving. There's a right way and a wrong way. Adler's and Van Doren's way, of course, is the right way. Anything else - I guess it's " yeah, you can read, but you're not doing it right."

Seriously, I like Adler - a lot. As you probably know, he was THE proponent of The Great Books in education, founding The Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. A brilliant, accomplished man. Story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_J._Adler

 

Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965) by Hannah Arendt. A very interesting read on "the banality of evil" and how an administrative state can be weaponized just by good people standing by.

Interestingly the book pokes major holes in the conduct of the trial. Even though it didn't follow standard procedure, Eichmann's guilt was already well known and effectively a formality.

 

Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David S. Lifton
A delicious narrative about the variances in the medical evidence around the assassination.

 

I remember some years ago that CBS's 60 Minutes did a segment about how Kim Jung-Il would just kidnap people who had a skill he wanted in the country, or to teach/train North Koreans.

 

I'm wrapping up my reading of Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (9th. ed, 2010) by Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley. This is a complete review of American foreign policy in 500 pages, starting at the US entry into WWII and going up to the election of Obama. I've learned a lot, and it's light enough that I'm going to re-read it with a notebook/highlighter as soon as I finish so I can try to soak more of it in. Very enjoyable. In a couple weeks I'm going to attempt the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) and this was recommended as preparation for that. I can see why.

 

Inside a US Embassy: How the Foreign Service Works for America (2nd Ed.) by the American Foreign Service Association (2003) is a very light read.

Half the book is focused on one page summaries of each role held in an Embassy, not just the Ambassador and Consular Officers we might think of but also the USAID and US Commercial Service Foreign Service Officers and allied roles. They interview a specific person holding each role who talks about the specifics in the context of their location, such as an Economic Officer in Russia, a Consular Officer in Mexico or an Environmental Officer in Cote d'Ivoire.

The more interesting half of the book was the second half, made up of one-day journals where people document the meetings and specific issues they had to deal with throughout the day.

A little over 100 pages, it was a quick read but an interesting look into the Foreign Service, despite being dated. I see the third edition was released in 2010.

 

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea (2014) by Bandi (Korean for butterfly), the pseudonym of a writer living in the country, whose writings are smuggled out. It's made up of 7 short stories depicting life under the regime.

Very moving. The pages of the book are ragged, I'm not sure if that's intentional but it accentuates the feeling that this is a book of banned literature that would see the writer put to death if caught.

 

The New Deal and Texas History- Ronald Goodwin

 

I am now reading "The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America" by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, which was published by Oxford University Press this year.

Here's the description: A groundbreaking argument that the political spectrum today is inadequate to twenty-first century America and a major source of the confusion and hostility that characterize contemporary political discourse. As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today. Far from being an eternal dividing line of American politics, the political spectrum came to the United States in the 1920s and, since then, left and right have evolved in so many unpredictable and even contradictory ways that there is currently nothing other than tribal loyalty holding together the many disparate positions that fly under the banners of "liberal" and "conservative." Powerfully argued and cutting against the grain of most scholarship on polarization in America, this book shows why the idea that
the political spectrum measures deeply held worldviews is the central political myth of our time and a major cause of the confusion and vitriol that characterize public discourse.

You can read slightly more about it here;

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/how-the-mythical-left-right-political-spectrum-harms-america-book-review/