Larissa MacFarquhar: The Deflationist. Profile, with picture of the wife and cats, and more than you really need to know about the condo in St. Croix. Subtitle is "How Paul Krugman found politics." Answer has a lot to do with wife Robin Wells, who as far as I can tell is sharper and more passionate about it.

During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn't think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. "I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues," he says. "I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned." He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn't get him thinking about politics. [ . . . ]

For the first twenty years of Krugman's adult life, his world was divided not into left and right but into smart and stupid. "The great lesson was the low level of discussion," he says of his time in Washington. "The then Secretary of the Treasury" -- Donald Regan -- "was not that bright, and you could have angry exchanges where neither side understood the policy."

The first book I read by Krugman was Peddling Prosperity: Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations (1995), a Clinton-era book that was remarkably even-handed in dumping on liberal Democrats as well as conservative Republicans. (I missed his earlier popular book The Age of Diminished Expectations: US Economic Policy in the 1990s, which is more likely to have taken aim at Reagan's economic policies.) MacFarquhar sums up:

Krugman's tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn't understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types "policy entrepreneurs" -- a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations.

That's an important point, one that a lot of things flow out of. For starters, corporations can fire workers, but countries cannot. Corporations are hierarchical, authoritarian, streamlined, purposely disciplined, and secretive in ways that would be intolerable in a country. Given these disparities you have to wonder why anyone would think that corporate leadership in any way qualified one for leading a country.

One thing you have to give Krugman credit for is that he didn't waste any time trying to be fair and balanced about George W. Bush: he published his attack on Bush's tax plans -- Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan -- before the ink was dry. In a world where politics was filled with calculated bullshit, he bought none of it. He hasn't cut Obama much slack either:

In fact, the change came faster than either of them had anticipated, because during the primary campaign Krugman was very critical of Barack Obama. He was critical chiefly because, of the three main candidates, Obama seemed to him the most conservative (his health plan, for instance, didn't mandate universal coverage), but it wasn't just his policies that Krugman objected to. He couldn't stand all the feel-good stuff about hope and dialogue and reconciliation. He hated that Obama was out there saying nice things about Reagan when what Democrats needed to do most was debunk the persistent myth that Reaganomics had been good for America. He thought Obama was completely wrong to believe that the country's problems were due largely to partisan nastiness, and ridiculously naïve to imagine that he could bring together Republicans and insurance companies to reform health care. "Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world," he wrote in 2007.

I suspect now that Krugman's initial antipathy to Obama had more to do with his freshwater/saltwater economic dichotomy: while you can't paint Obama as a purebred Chicago-school economist, he does seem to have picked up pieces of the attitude, especially Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's subtly manipulative "nudge" framework. Krugman may be right that Obama was more conservative than Clinton or Edwards, but he was free of some of their baggage -- not least their Iraq War votes. Since Obama took office some things are clearer and some are not. His cautious, conservative instincts have come out front, way ahead of his clear reasoning and even his inspirational oratory. He has repeatedly not just pulled his punches but refused to throw them. He unaccountably, inexcusably kept much of Bush's security and treasury teams, adding a few Clinton people (including dependably hawkish Hillary Clinton), and they have continued to operate much as they did under Bush (or at least under Clinton). Krugman has yet to criticize such policies in personal terms (as I just did), but he's held tight to the issues, cutting Obama slack as a practicing politician but not as a policy theorist (e.g., on stimulus size).

A lot of background info here, including a good summary of the academic work that Krugman built his Nobel Prize rep on. More currently:

Why was it so politically difficult to reregulate the banks? he wondered. Why couldn't the Administration harness the populist outrage? What good had Wall Street ever done for America? "There must be something useful in there, but it is really hard to see what," he says. "That's everybody's challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. If there are arbitrage opportunities and you're able to spot them a few seconds before anybody else, you can make a lot of money, but there's no actual social gain from doing that. We've tried talking to our friends in finance, and they say, 'Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.' Well, there is some social loss if people are hanging on to a lot of idle cash, so the financial system, by providing liquid assets that provide a pretty good yield, is supposed to deal with that. But it turns out that, just when you need it most, that liquidity froze." [ . . . ]

The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn't understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn't. "It hasn't been the searing experience," he says. "A lot of people got burned, but I'm not sure that they'll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, 'I'd rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.' So, unless there's a lot more regulation, we could do this again." Krugman had been getting more and more pessimistic about the possibilities for recovery. Already, incredibly, people seemed to be forgetting that America's economy had nearly collapsed, and the usual critics of deficit spending and those who did not share his sanguine attitude toward inflation were speaking up again.

Part of the problem is that there are lots of variant notions of what constitutes a recovery, starting with Goldman Sachs' profit/loss sheet, which has already recovered (without so much as a "thank you very much"). Part of the problem is that it's harder than ever to connect the dots, especially when people in a position of authority like Obama are reluctant to do so. I basically bought the argument that it was necessary to bail the banks out in order to prevent further destruction of the real economy, but we should have gotten the necessary reforms as part of the quid pro quo back when the banks were facing the abyss. That didn't happen -- in part because Bush and Obama didn't want to further undermine confidence in the system; in part because the banks had so much inside clout the regulators were tripping over themselves trying to do them favors -- and as the moment has passed, the metaphor has lost its impact (if indeed anyone outside of the financial sector understood it anyway).

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Ask the Author Live: Larissa MacFarquhar with Paul Krugman: An interview (no longer live) following up on the article.

Loudon Wainwright III: The Paul Krugman Blues: Not up to "Kings and Queens" or "Rufus Is a Tit Man" but germane enough for a link.

Paul Krugman: The Bankruptcy Boys: The best of his recent columns, maybe because the target is as easy to hit as an elephant. Republicans have been pursuing this "starve the beast" strategy for years. (I first ran into it when a friend insisted on tipping in cash for credit card-charged meals so that the tip might escape the taxman's net, thereby depriving the government of a tiny bit of money to waste.) The most extreme version of this is the Republican vote against raising the federal debt limit -- a ploy to force the government into default, which will presumably make borrowing any more money more expensive. Such a move would be nothing short of insane, but there it is. And really, drowning the government in the bathtub is just as insane.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn't enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe.

Why anyone would trust the Republicans to manage the government they hate through a catastrophe is beyond me. Masochism? Stupidity? Death wish?

Another quick round of book notes, including some of the Af/Pak books mentioned in yesterday's post. I haven't actually been looking around very hard: haven't spent as much time as usual in bookstores or libraries, and haven't spent much time scrounging through the new release lists. Nonetheless, I've accumulated my quota of things to mention.

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Moshe Adler: Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal (2009, New Press): About time someone turned the tables on "the dismal science" and show that what's dismal about it is how susceptible it is to political whims of its practitioners.

Perry Anderson: The New Old World (2009, Verso): New Left Review editor and historian, surveys Europe after the Cold War, a time when Europe is widely presumed to have come into its own, but still habitually follows US foreign policy, no matter how benighted (which under Bush, in particular, was pretty far gone).

Joyce Oldham Appleby: The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (2010, WW Norton): General history, touting the culture of capitalism as well as the economics.

René Backmann: A Wall in Palestine (paperback, 2010, Picador): More like the wall in Palestine, cutting through the West Bank, less for security than to impose a new partition on the landscape, and not much about that either given the Israelis show every intent to keep both sides.

Bruce Bartlett: The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a Way Forward (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Still a self-styled conservative, but whereas his 2006 book still clung to Reagan's legacy (title: Impostor: How George W Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy) and his 2008 book was dishonest (title: Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past) he finally has some doubts about Saint Ronald. Now he's pitching Keynes and the Welfare State to his conservative brethren, but it's probably too high and hard for them to touch.

Mats Berdal: Building Peace after War: A Critical Assessment of International Peacebuilding from Cambodia to Afghanistan (paperback, 2009, Taylor & Francis): Short (186 pp) primer, drawing on multiple cases including Congo. Most likely this is one of those subjects where successes are all alike but failures each break apart in their own ways.

Barbara Bick: Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (paperback, 2008, Feminist Press at CUNY): Peace/women's rights activist, moved to Afghanistan in 1990 as civil war superseded the US-backed mujahideen war against the Soviet-backed regime, again in 2001 to the anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley before 9/11, again in 2004.

Eric Blehm: The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan (2010, Harper): Heroic war literature with all those touchingly valorous little details. Hard to tell what actually happened from the hype, but it looks like this team dropped into Afghanistan in late 2001 to help organize Karzai's anti-Taliban Pashtun rebellion, which didn't exactly work out even then let alone for the long haul. More Afghan war memoirs/stories since last I collected a list: Jon Lee Anderson: The Lion's Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan; Colin Berry: The Deniable Agent: Undercover in Afghanistan; Christie Blatchford: Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army; Matthew Currier Burden: The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; John T Carney: No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan; Dayna Curry/Heather Mercer: Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan; Ed Darack: Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - The Marine Corps ' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan; Lt Gen Michael DeLong: A General Speaks Out: The Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Mike Friscolanti: Friendly Fire: The Untold Story of the US Bombing That Killed Four Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan; Chuck Larson: Heroes Among Us: Firsthand Accounts of Combat from America's Most Decorated Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan; Marcus Luttrell/Patrick Robinson: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10; Malcolm MacPherson: Roberts Ridge : A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan; Sean Maloney: Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan, and Confronting the Chaos: A Rogue Military Historian Returns to Afghanistan; Sean Naylor: Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda; Johnny Rico: Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America; Peter Telep: Direct Action: Special Forces in Afghanistan; Chris Wattie: Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle That Saved Afghanistan; Stephen D Wrage, ed: Immaculate Warfare: Participants Reflect on the Air Campaigns Over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; Thomas W Young: The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan; also: Masood Farivar: Confessions of a Mullah Warrior; Emmanuel Guibert/Frederic Lemercier/Didier Lefevre: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders; Patrick Macrory: Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan 1842; Matthew J Morgan: A Democracy Is Born: An Insider's Account of the Battle Against Terrorism in Afghanistan; Jules Stewart: Crimson Snow: Britain's First Disaster in Afghanistan (i.e., 1841); Christine Sullivan: Saving Cinnamon: The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home; Mary Tillman: Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman.

Kristina Borjesson, ed: Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11: The Journalists Speak Out (2005, Prometheus): Interviews with 21 journalists on the pressures to support the Bush terror wars. Not sure who all is interviewed, but some war critics are included -- Paul Krugman, Juan Cole, Chris Hedges -- as well as bigwigs like Ted Koppel. Borjesson previously edited Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

Jennifer Burns: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009, Oxford University Press): Right-wing libertarian hero, one of the more unorthodox and unruly figures in American conservatism, all but worshipped for her two big novels, the main point of which seems to be that you can never be too greedy. I developed an intense dislike for her based on exposure to acolyte Nathaniel Branden, which may or may not be fully deserved.

Matthew Carr: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (2009, New Press): In 1492 the Christian Reconquista defeated the last Muslim enclave in Spain. It also marked the beginning of the Inquisition, which killed or expelled all of the Muslims and Jews from Spain. This focuses on the Muslim side of the story, a horrific episode of what we now call ethnic cleansing.

Hillel Cohen: Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (2010, University of California Press): Important book on Israel's recruitment and use of collaborators. Cohen previously covered the earlier period in Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948. Subsequent volumes are likely to get ever stickier, especially after 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and after 1988 when Intifada broke out. Still, the principles were established early, and the effects within Palestinian society have been devastating. (I've read reviews of the original Hebrew edition.)

Stephen F Cohen: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (2009, Columbia University Press): The main interest here is probably the path by which the US and post-Soviet Russia returned to a quasi-Cold War standoff. Not sure how much of that there is, since Cohen is a Soviet studies guy, and likes to show off his expertise back to prime Stalinism.

Stephen P Cohen: Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Plenty to write about, but unless one tackles Israel, petrodollars, and military hubris there's not much to say about it. Cohen is a think tank "expert" on the region, which means he's on someone's payroll.

Brian Coughley: War, Coups and Terror: Pakistan's Army in Years of Turmoil (2009, Skyhorse): A British "expert" on all aspects of the Pakistan military, having spent a good deal of his life in Imperial armies.

David Faber: And Then the Roof Caved In: How Wall Street's Greed and Stupidity Brought Capitalism to Its Knees (2009, Wiley): CNBC business analyst, keeps it short (208 pp) and vivid, but probably not very deep.

David Faber: Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II (2009, Simon & Schuster): The event in question is the most clichéd in the 20th century, so it would be good to get a fresh review of the situation. Not sure whether this book does that, but it does appear to be a substantial book on the subject -- at least it weighs out at 528 pp. Not sure that it helps that he's less a historian than a journalist.

Michael Fellman: In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (2010, Yale University Press): Argues that terrorism has been "a constant and driving force in American history." Casts a fairly wide net: John Brown, Sherman's march through Georgia (but not his efforts to exterminate bison to starve out the Indians?), Ku Klux Klan, Haymarket Square, the Philippines War. We all recall that "violence as as American as apple pie," but I'm doubtful that resurrecting our love/hate affair with terrorism is a good idea.

Antonio Giustozzi: Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (paperback, 2009, Columbia University Press): Promises a great deal of detail on how the neo-Taliban works, but I suspect it's still sketchy, and I'm not sure how the author got what he got.

Antonio Giustozzi: Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords of Afghanistan (2009, Columbia University Press): Not sure that the warlord side of the Afghan equation is any easier to research than the Taliban side. Ismail Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum are prominent subjects here.

Michael Hogan: Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium (paperback, 2009, Booklocker.com): Essays on Latin America, recommended by Noam Chomsky. Probably not the Michael J Hogan who has a number of books on cold war diplomatic history, nor the novelist Michael Hogan, but the Michael Hogan with a couple of previous books on Mexico is a possibility.

Raymond Ibrahim, ed: The Al Qaeda Reader (paperback, 2007, Broadway): In case your copy of Mein Kampf is lonely. Introduction is by Victor Davis Hanson, who's certain to muddy the waters.

Tim Jackson: Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (2009, Earthscan): Short book (160 pp), arguing that it is possible to have broader prosperity without economic growth, a good thing given the limits to growth posed by natural resource constraints. Most economists seem to believe that trickle down from infinite growth will satisfy everyone, but that strikes me as not just untenable but downright dumb.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson/Joseph N Cappella: Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2008; paperback, 2010, Oxford University Press): Also focuses on Wall Street Journal opinion pages and Fox News. Has a lot of charts and stuff.

Alex S Jones: Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (2009, Oxford University Press): Specifically newspaper news. Others have pointed out that there is no shortage of demand for news now; rather, there's a shortfall in supply from newspapers, which traditionally provided news as a sideline to their now-suffering business of selling advertising. I'll also add that the demise of newspapers is less of a problem than the demise of democracy, which has been increasingly evident in newspapers' lack of interest in searching out real political problems.

Robert Lacey: Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (2009, Viking): Broad-ranging survey of Saudi Arabia these days. Lacey previously wrote The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa'ud back in 1981, which had the good fortune of being banned by the Saudis.

David Loyn: In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Short book (288 pp) for the range, but occupations often look alike. Nice company.

Jamie Maslin: Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn: A Hitchhiker's Adventures in the New Iran (2009, Skyhorse): Sounds like a good idea to me, but I'd bet that Iranians don't hold a candle to good ole American porn, much less American rap. Still, good to see that Iran isn't as monolithic as caricatured. On the other hand, I can't say that porn and rap have ever had much political impact, even here.

Pankaj Mishra: Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (paperback, 2007, Picador): Travel reporting on the influence of the west on south and central Asia.

Richard North: Ministry of Defeat: The British in Iraq 2003-2009 (2009, Continuum): "This has become one of the most humiliating chapters in British Military History . . . the only real success of the British Government has been to hide from view." Still sounds smarter than the Americans.

William L O'Neill: A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001 (2009, Ivan R Dee): A history of the 1990s, a rare period of peace and prosperity bracketed by the two forever wars. O'Neill has tended to write kaleidoscopic period histories: A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home & Abroad in World War II; American High: The Years of Confidence 1945-1960; Coming Apart: An Informal History of the 1960s.

Jerrold M Post: The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda (paperback, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan): Dives into the murky waters of trying to build a psychological profile for terrorists, which seems like one more way to miss the political point.

Filip Reyntjens: The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006 (2009, Cambridge University Press): Books about the extraordinarily bloody Congo War(s) are finally coming to light: Gerard Prunier's was called Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, which still seems to be like the first goto book, but reviews were pretty mixed.

Bruce Riedel: The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (2008, Brookings Press): CIA guy, GWOT insider, profiles the Enemy in considerable detail, thinks he knows how to beat him/them.

Andrew M Roe: Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of bin Laden, 1849-1947 (2010, University Press of Kansas): "As much of a powder keg today as it was when India was part of the British Empire," and much for the same reasons. I still recall John Major after 9/11 boasting of how much the British could teach the US about dealing with terrorism. This is what they can teach us about securing the sliver of Pakistan called Waziristan.

Mick Simonelli: Riding a Donkey Backwards Through Afghanistan: How I Successfully Spent $400 Million of Your Taxpayer Dollars to Build the Afghanistan National Army (paperback, 2009, Mill City): Obviously, an inside job; I gather he's planning on a sequel where he bumps the figure to $2.1 billion. At that rate, Afghanistan will have the highest military expense/GDP ratio in the world, a ratio unimaginable in any country that has to pay its way. Only someone who realizes how ridiculous that is would name his book thusly.

Rodney Stark: God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (2009, Harper Collins): Argues that the Crusades were just the response of Europe to "Muslim terrorist aggression," as opposed to religious fanaticism or incipient imperialism, which have been pretty universally understood to be the range of options. Wonder where he got such a novel idea? Certainly not from history.

Mary Anne Weaver: Pakistan: Deep Inside the World's Most Frightening State (paperback, 2010, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Looks like a rework of Weaver's 2002 book Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan, maybe even a plain reissue: certainly a lot more has happened in the last eight years than comfortably fits within an extra 16 pages.

David Wildman/Phyllis Bennis: Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer (paperback, 2010, Olive Branch Press): Bennis also has primers on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Iraq war. Few critics cover the ground more surely or get to the point quicker.

Garry Wills: Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010, Penguin Press): Another book on the endless growth of presidential power, this one tying it to the atom bomb trigger, going back as far as the Manhattan project.

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I usually do a paperback update, but will hold that off until next time. (Shouldn't be soon enough, as I have 34 notes left over.)

Peter Bergen: The Ultimate AfPak Reading List: Bergen's reading list covers Afghanistan (Soviet Invasion from 1979-89, rise and rule of the Talian 1994-2001, and post-2001), Pakistan (general, post-2001 Jihadism), and Al Qaeda (general, 1988-2001, since 2001, media strategy) with some background (underlyilng causes of 9/11 attacks, Islamist terrorism and its intellectual influences). A big chunk of those books have been on my reading list, so I thought I'd consolidate the list from 11 pages to 1, merge the categories, drop the essays (which no doubt are of equal interest), and add links to my book pages (where I have them; [*] denotes an entry in by Book Notes file):

• 9/11 Commission Report (2004, Norton): An authoritative account and actually a good read, surprisingly so for a government report.
• Hassan Abbas: Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror (2005, M.E. Sharpe, 2005): 89-177.
• Mariam Abou Zahab/Olivier Roy: Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (2004, Hurst). [*]
• Abdel-Bari Atwan: The Secret History of al-Qa'ida (2006, University of California Press). A concise primer. [*]
• Daniel Benjamin/Steven Simon: The Age of Sacred Terror (2002, Random House): 38-94.
• Owen Bennett Jones: Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (2002, Yale University Press). [*; 3rd ed, 2009, Yale University Press]
• Peter Bergen: Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2002, Touchstone): Reporting on the ground about al Qaeda around the world. Easy read (I think.)
• Peter Bergen: The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (2006, Free Press): A collection of interviews with those who have known bin Laden and key documents such as the founding minutes of al Qaeda.
• Paul Berman: Terror and Liberalism (2003, Norton): Argues that the jihadist threat is similar to the fascist or communist threat in terms of both its ideology and goals.
• Gary Bernsten: Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (2005, Crown): CIA officer recounts the fall of Taliban and the battle of Tora Bora.
• Henry Bradsher: Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention (1999, Oxford University Press).
• Jason Burke: Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (2003, IB Tauris): A really sharp combination of on the ground reporting and analysis.
• Sarah Chayes: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2006, Penguin): A journalist-turned-aid worker based in Kandahar for four years after the fall of the Taliban provides an interesting and important account of mistakes made by all the players in the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
• Richard Clarke, ed: Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face (2008, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science).
• Stephen Cohen: The Idea of Pakistan (2005, Brookings): Well written general history. 61-200.
• Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (paperback, 2004, Penguin Press): Deeply reported. Won the Pulitzer for best non-fiction book of 2004. [*]
• Steve Coll: The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008, Penguin Press): An absorbing read about a family caught between the 7th and 21st centuries. Finalist for a Pulitzer in 2008. [*]
• David Cook: Understanding Jihad (2005, University of California Press): An erudite explanation of the history of jihadist thought.
• Gordon Corera: Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (2006, Oxford University Press).
• George Crile: Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (2003, Atlantic Monthly Press). [*]
• James Dobbins: After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (2008, Potomac Press).
• Gilles Dorronsoro: Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to Present (2005, Columbia University Press, 2005): Dense, authoritative study. [*]
• Mamoun Fandy: Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (1999, St Martin's Press): 177-194.
• Douglas Farah: Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (2004, Broadway).
• Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (2009, Harper Collins).
• Reuven Firestone: Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (1999, Oxford University Press): 13-18 and 47-65.
• Yosri Fouda/Nick Fielding: Masterminds of Terror (2003, Mainstream Publishing): 73-87, 105-122, 123-147, 196-202.
• Douglas Frantz/Catherine Collins: The Man From Pakistan: The True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler (2007, Grand Central Publishing). [note: originally published as The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets . . . and How We Could Have Stopped Him (2007, Twelve)] [*]
• Dalton Fury: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (2008, St Martin's Press). [*]
• Fawaz Gerges: The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (2005, Cambridge): Well researched account of how the global jihadist movement is riven by internecine ideological disputes and petty feuds. 1-80, 119-151, 185-250. [*]
• Antonio Giustozzi: Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: the Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (2006, Columbia University Press). [*]
• Karen Greenberg, ed: Al Qaeda Now: Understanding Today's Terrorists (2005, Cambridge): A stimulating collection of essays.
• Roy Gutman: How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (2008, USIP Press). [*]
• Husain Haqqani: Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005, Carnegie).
• Bruce Hoffman: Inside Terrorism (1998, Columbia University Press): 87-129.
• Rex Hudson: The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why (1999, Lyons Press).
• Zahid Hussain: Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle Within Militant Islam (2007, Columbia). [*]
• Jamestown Foundation: Pakistan's Troubled Frontier: The Future of the FATA and the NWFP (2009).
• Chris Johnson/Jolyon Leslie: Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace (2004, Zed Books): Two long time aid workers paint a bleak picture of Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban.
• Seth Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009, Norton). [*]
• Gilles Kepel: Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (1986, University of California Press): 36-67.
• Gilles Kepel: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002, Belknap Press): 1-20. [*]
• David Kilcullen: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (2009, Oxford University Press). [*]
• Alan Krueger: What Makes a Terrorist (2007, Princeton University Press): 1-52.
• Bernard Lewis: The Political Language of Islam (1988, University of Chicago Press): 71-90.
• Brynjar Lia: Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri (2008, Columbia University Press)
• William Maley, ed: Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (1998, New York University Press)
• William Maley: Rescuing Afghanistan (2007, UNSW Press): A concise book that examines the problems and possible solutions in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban government.
• Terry McDermott: Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers -- Who They Were, Why They Did It (2005, Harper Collins): An excellent narrative.
• Hugh Miles: Al-Jazeera (2005, Abacus).
• Pervez Musharraf: In the Line of Fire (2008, Free Press): 197-281.
• Shuja Nawaz: Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (2008, Oxford University Press). [*]
• Sean Naylor: Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (2005, Berkeley Publishing Group): Army Times reporter gives a deeply reported account of Operation Anaconda. [*]
• Robert Pape: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005, Random House): Argues that campaigns of suicide terrorism are more motivated by nationalism than religion.
• Marianne Pearl: A Mighty Heart (2003, Scribner): 113-189.
• Sayyid Qutb: Milestones (1991, American Trust Publications).
• Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (paperback, 2001, Yale University Press). [*]
• Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008, Penguin). [*]
• Louise Richardson: What Terrorists Want (2007, Random House): 38-103. [*]
• Bruce Riedel: The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (2008, Brookings Press). [*]
• Malise Ruthven: A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (2002, Granta Books): 72-98.
• Marc Sageman: Understanding Terror Networks (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press): Sageman's groundbreaking sociological analysis of who joins al Qaeda and affiliated groups. [*]
• Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt). [*]
• Gary Schroen: First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (2005, Ballantine). [*]
• Michael Scheuer [aka: Anonymous]: Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (paperback, 2002, Brasseys): Written by the former head of the bin Laden unit at CIA. Well researched, analytically sharp.
• Michael Semple: Reconciliation in Afghanistan (2009, USIP Press).
• Mark Urban: War in Afghanistan (1998, Macmillan Press).
• Gabriel Weimann: Terror on the Internet (2006, United States Institute of Peace): The most authoritative account of terrorists' use of the Internet.
• Laurence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006, Knopf): A gripping narrative of the jihadist movement from its birth in Egypt in the mid-20th century up until 9/11. Won the Pulitzer Prize for best non-fiction book of 2006. [*]
• Mohammad Yousaf/Mark Adkin: Afghanistan -- The Bear: The Defeat of a Superpower. (1992, Leo Cooper) [possibly reissued as The Battle for Afghanistan: The Soviets Versus the Mujahideen in the 1980s (2009, Pen & Sword)].
• Rahimullah Yusufzai: Most Wanted: Profiles of Terror (2002, Lotus/Roli): 132-144, Interrogations of Omar Sheikh and Maulana Azhar.
• Ayman al Zawahiri: Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet (2001): This document is Zawahiri's autobiography, and it also outlines his political philosophy. It runs about 75 pages and is essential reading to understand him.

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The section on Pakistan is very short, not that there's a lot more to choose from, aside from narrow and rather dated monographs. The omission of Tariq Ali's The Duel is notable both as a substantial book on Pakistan and for what it says about American power as a root cause for the troubles. The section on root causes is also short, and focuses exclusively on terrorist psychology, whereas it should be obvious that at least part of the problem is the US has sent its corporations, military, and spies far from the homeland. No small amount has been written about that, both on the general problems of empire and on specific conflicts -- Iraq and Israel would each swamp the list, Iran and Saudi Arabia would add significantly to it, and there are other hot spots. For the most part I haven't singled out books like that unless they specifically tripped my keyword searches below. Any broad spectrum survey of US politics in the region would include works by Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky, James Carroll, Jonathan Schell, Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Kinzer, Tim Weiner, Dilip Hiro, Tariq Ali, and Michael Klare.

Scrounging through the Book Notes file, looking for keywords (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Islam, jihad, al Qaeda, terror), but skipping books focusing on other Arab areas, suggests some additional books. The main thing that's missing above is a better critique on how the US got so tangled up in the Muslim world that it became a target of al Qaeda, and what sort of ideology plays out in the compulsion to revenge 9/11 by waging an indiscriminate war against civilians who had nothing to do with al Qaeda.

• Akbar S Ahmed: Resistance and Control in Pakistan (1983; revised ed, paperback, 2004, Taylor & Francis)
• Tariq Ali: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002, Verso): The first significant effort to recognize the common obsessions of both sides.
• Tariq Ali: Rough Music: Blair Bombs Baghdad London Terror (paperback, 2006, Verso)
• Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner): An important introduction to Pakistan, uncovering much that is uncommented on elsewhere, such as the pervasive corruption.
• Ali A Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009, Yale University Press)
• Tamin Ansary: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (2009, Public Affairs)
• Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (2009, Random House): A deep look at the split within Islam.
• Walden Bello: Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (paperback, 2006, Holt)
• Mats Berdal: Building Peace After War: A Critical Assessment of International Peacebuilding (paperback, 2009, Taylor & Francis)
• Barbara Bick: Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (paperback, 2008, Feminist Press at CUNY)
• Artyom Borovik: The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (paperback, 2001, Grove Press)
• Michael Burleigh: Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (2009, Harper Collins)
• Caleb Carr: The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again (2002, Random House)
• Matthew Carr: The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism From the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda (paperback, 2008, New Press)
• Melody Ermachild Chavis: Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan: The Martyr Who Founded RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (paperback, 2004, St Martin's Press)
• Ira Chernus: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (paperback, 2006, Paradigm)
• John Cooley: Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (3rd ed, paperback, 2002, Pluto Press)
• Brian Coughley: War, Coups and Terror: Pakistan's Army in Years of Turmoil (2009, Skyhorse)
• Christopher Coyne: After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (paperback, 2007, Stanford Economics and Finance)
• Robert D Crews/Amin Tarzi, eds: The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (2008; paperback, 2009, Harvard University Press) [*]
• Mark Danner: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (2009, Nation Books)
• Meghnad Desai: Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror (paperback, 2006, IB Tauris)
• Robert Dreyfuss: Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005; paperback, 2006, Holt): How the US promoted Jihadism for Cold War purposes.
• David B Edwards: Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (paperback, 2002, University of California Press)
• Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007, Metropolitan Books): Paints the US response to 9/11 as a nervous breakdown, couched in eons of frontier myth.
• Paul Fitzgerald/Elizabeth Gould: Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (paperback, 2009, City Lights)
• Fawaz A Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (paperback, 1999, Cambridge University Press)
• Fawaz A Gerges: Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (2006; paperback, 2007, Harcourt)
• Antonio Giustozzi: Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords of Afghanistan (2009, Columbia University Press)
• Aaron Glantz: Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (paperback, 2008, Haymarket Books)
• Larry P Goodson: Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (paperback, 2001, University of Washington Press)
• Lester W Grau/Michael A Gress, eds: The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (paperback, 2002, University Press of Kansas): From the Russian General Staff papers.
• John Gray: Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (paperback, 2005, New Press)
• Ramachandra Guha: India After Gandhi: The History of the Largest Democracy (2007, Ecco): Long history of India, which inevitably impinges on Pakistan.
• Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (2007, Cambridge University Press)
• Raymond Ibrahim, ed: The Al Qaeda Reader (paperback, 2007, Broadway)
• Ayesha Jalal: Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (2008, Harvard University Press)
• Arif Jamal: Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (2009, Melville House)
• Chris Johnson/Joylon Leslie: Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace (2nd ed, paperback, 2008, Zed Books)
• Ann Jones: Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (paperback, 2007, Picador)
• Robert D Kaplan: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990; paperback, 2001, Vintage): Cheerleader-propagandist for the mujahideen.
• Robert D Kaplan: Imperial Grunts: On the Ground With the American Military, From Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq (2005, Random House)
• Robert D Kaplan: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (2007, Random House)
• Gilles Kepel: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004, Belknap Press): A postscript to the author's critically important Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, which left off viewing 9/11 as a desperate measure reflecting bin Laden's terminal weakness.
• Gilles Kepel/Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (2008; paperback, 2009, Belknap Press)
• Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Hegemony in the Middle East (2009, Beacon Press)
• M Ashgar Khan: We've Learnt Nothing from History: Pakistan: Politics and Military Power (2006, Oxford University Press)
• Yasmin Khan: The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (paperback, 2008, Yale University Press)
• Sonali Kolhatkar/James Ingalls: Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (paperback, 2006, Seven Stories Press)
• Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009, Doubleday)
• Christina Lamb: The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan (2003; paperback, 2004, Harper Perennial)
• Mark LeVine: Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (2005, Oneworld)
• Mark LeVine: Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (paperback, 2008, Three Rivers Press)
• Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (paperback, 2002, Harper Perennial)
• Adam B Lowther: Americans and Asymmetric Conflict: Lebanon, Somalia, and Afghanistan (2007, ABC-CLIO)
• David Loyn: In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (2009, Palgrave Macmillan)
• William Maley: The Afghanistan Wars (2002; second ed, paperback, Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
• Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004, Pantheon): On how our views of Muslims are affected by US tactical interests, no matter how inconsistent.
• Eric S Margolis: War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet (revised ed, paperback, 2002, Routledge)
• Eric S Margolis: American Raj: America and the Muslim World (2008; paperback, 2009, Key Porter)
• Stephen L Melton: The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward) (2009, MBI)
• Nick B Mills: Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (2007, John Wiley & Sons)
• Pankaj Mishra: Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (paperback, 2007, Picador)
• Greg Mortensen: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time (paperback, 2007, Penguin Books): An alternate, more practicable path to nation-building.
• Greg Mortensen: Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009, Viking)
• Azhar Hassan Nadeem: Pakistan: The Political Economy of Lawlessness (2002, Oxford University Press)
• Omar Nasiri: Inside the Global Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story (2006; paperback, 2008, Perseus)
• Ronald E Neumann: The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (2009, Potomac Books)
• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne)
• Gregory Alonso Pirio: The African Jihad: Bin Laden's Quest for the Horn of Africa (paperback, 2007, Red Sea Press)
• Norman Podhoretz: World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007, Doubleday)
• William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007, Harper): A comparative history as the US moves from revolutionary insurgents to imperial counterinsurgents.
• Jerrold M Post: The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda (paperback, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan)
• Deborah Rodriguez: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil (paperback, 2007, Random House)
• Andrew M Roe: Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of bin Laden, 1849-1947 (2010, University Press of Kansas)
• Olivier Roy: The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (2008, Columbia University Press)
• Barnett R Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2nd ed, paperback, 2002, Yale University Press)
• Marc Sageman: Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press
• Marc Sageman, ed: Unmasking Terror: A Global Review of Terrorist Activities (paperback, 2007, Jamestown Foundation)
• Michael Scheuer [Anonymous]: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004, Potomac Books)
• Michael Scheuer: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (2008, Free Press)
• Asne Seierstad: The Bookseller of Kabul (paperback, 2004, Little Brown)
• Ayesha Siddiqa: Military Inc: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy (paperback, 2007, Pluto Press)
• Mick Simonelli: Riding a Donkey Backwards Through Afghanistan: How I Successfully Spent $400 Million of Your Taxpayer Dollars to Build the Afghanistan National Army (paperback, 2009, Mill City)
• Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (2004; paperback, 2006, Harvest Books): A winter 2001-02 trek across the mountains, in Babur's footsteps, in Bush's wake, in the brief moment of Taliban retreat.
• Stephen Tanner: Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban (2002; revised ed, paperback, 2009, Da Capo)
• John B Taylor: Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World (paperback, 2008, WW Norton)
• Alex von Tunzelman: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007, Henry Holt): A top-down view of partition, easy on Nehru, hard on Jinnah.
• Mary Anne Weaver: Pakistan: Deep Inside the World's Most Frightening State (paperback, 2010, Farrar Straus and Giroux)
• David Wildman/Phyllis Bennis: Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer (paperback, 2010, Olive Branch Press)
• Lawrence Ziring: Pakistan: At the Crosscurrent of History (paperback, 2005, Oneworld)

Also found mentions of a bunch of Afghanistan war memoirs: Jon Lee Anderson: The Lion's Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan; Colin Berry: The Deniable Agent: Undercover in Afghanistan; Christie Blatchford: Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army; Eric Blehm: The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan; Mark W Bromwich: Captains Blog: The Chronicles of My Afghan Vacation; Matthew Currier Burden: The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; John T Carney: No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan; Jeff Courter: Afghan Journal: A Soldier's Year in Afghanistan; Dayna Curry/Heather Mercer: Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan; Ed Darack: Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - The Marine Corps' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan; Lt Gen Michael DeLong: A General Speaks Out: The Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Brandon Friedman: The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War; Mike Friscolanti: Friendly Fire: The Untold Story of the US Bombing That Killed Four Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan; Chuck Larson: Heroes Among Us: Firsthand Accounts of Combat from America's Most Decorated Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan; Joe LeBleu: Long Rifle: A Sniper's Story in Iraq and Afghanistan; Marcus Luttrell/Patrick Robinson: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10; Malcolm MacPherson: Roberts Ridge : A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan; Sean Maloney: Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan; Platte B Moring III: Honor First: A Citizen-Soldier in Afghanistan; Craig M Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education; Johnny Rico: Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America; Mike Ryan: Battlefield Afghanistan; Doug Stanton: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan; Peter Telep: Direct Action: Special Forces in Afghanistan; Benjamin Tupper: Welcome To Afghanistan: Send More Ammo: The Tragicomic Art of Making War as an Embedded Trainer in the Afghan National Army; Chris Wattie: Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle That Saved Afghanistan; Stephen D Wrage, ed: Immaculate Warfare: Participants Reflect on the Air Campaigns Over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; Thomas W Young: The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan; Regulo Zapata Jr: Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier; also: Masood Farivar: Confessions of a Mullah Warrior; Emmanuel Guibert/Frederic Lemercier/Didier Lefevre: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders; Ali Ahmad Jalali: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters Patrick Macrory: Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan 1842; Matthew J Morgan: A Democracy Is Born: An Insider's Account of the Battle Against Terrorism in Afghanistan; Jules Stewart: Crimson Snow: Britain's First Disaster in Afghanistan (i.e., 1841); Christine Sullivan: Saving Cinnamon: The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home; Vladislav Tamarov: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story; Mary Tillman: Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman; This list continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The stuff I've added is no doubt less selective than the original list, although it also helps fill in critical holes. Overall, this seems like an awful lot of material, but there are a lot of things poorly covered if covered at all: starting with day-by-day political relationships between the US and various Afghani and Pakistani agents; there is little systematic military analysis, especially of damage to civilians; there is little accounting of money spent; there is a massive propaganda snow job to unshovel; there are secret prisons with a legacy of torture; there is the matter of Karzai's miraculous purchase on his office. So the ultimate list is still to come. But this is a start.

As threatened, forty more. And not just leftovers; I'm finding a few more along the way.

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Amir D Aczel: Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry That Created the Nuclear Age (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Short book on early uranium research, focusing on the 1920s but extending more or less to Hiroshima.

Ken Auletta: Googled: The End of the World As We Know It (2009, Penguin): Author has written extensively about software and telecom industries, including critically about Microsoft, but he seems to have found something even more alarming in Google. I doubt that, but I do believe that the price we pay for advertising-sponsored services is much higher and far more perverse than we can imagine. I think Google tries to look at this pact benignly, asking how much useful service we can provide based on its advertising revenue stream, but I don't think it is so benign. Still, none of this exculpates Microsoft.

Louise Bardach: Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington (2009, Simon & Schuster): Claims to have inside dope on Castro's medical condition, but is mostly interested in speculating on what happens to Cuba once he passes. I imagine she finds a lot of nonsense. Don't know whether she can (or wants to) sort it all out.

Michael Belfiore: The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (2009, Smithsonian): DARPA is the Pentagon's R&D arm, which often came up with useful inventions -- at least until Reagan redirected its attention to the Star Wars nonsense. Since then their reputation for reclusiveness has increased, probably for shame. Author also wrote Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space, which sounds pretty gushy.

Walden Bello: The Food Wars (paperback, Verso, 2009): A third world view of US agribusiness and its designs on what the world eats, how it is grown, and who profits.

Michael Bérubé: The Left at War (2009, New York University Press): Something on the US Left's response to Bush's War on Terror, possibly inching back to Clinton's Balkan wars; details "a left at war with itself," presumably between liberal hawks who have no sense of what war actually does, and those of us who do. Focuses on "Manichean" Noam Chomsky, "juxtaposing him with Stuart Hall" (whoever that is). Bérubé seems to be one of those self-appointed thought police who identify with the left just to muddle it up.

James Bradley: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (2009, Little Brown): Author wrote Flags of Our Fathers, about his own father's experience in the war over Iwo Jima. Despite the broad subtitle, this appears to be a book about some specific mischief President Theodore Roosevelt and then-Secretary of War William Taft undertook in 1905 to fix US interests in the east Pacific by dividing up Asia.

Michael Burleigh: Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (2009, Harper Collins): A broad ranging smorgasbord of evil terrorists starting with 19th century anarchists, culminating in Al-Qaeda, most European or more/less directly tied to Europe. Lots of detail, but doesn't seem to have any overarching logic -- other than that terrorism is bad, of course.

Robert Cohen: Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009, Oxford University Press): Savio was the leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early 1960s, an interesting and iconic new left figure who largely faded from the spotlight from the mid-1960s.

Len Colodny/Tom Schachtman: The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (2009, Harper Collins): Faces on the cover: Kissinger, Cheney, Nixon, Bush, Perle (I think), Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Obama. Only some of those are neocons, although Kissinger's usual exemption doesn't seem all that stury. Unfortunate that Obama hasn't been able to shake this association, especially given how completely the prime neocon movers had been disgraced under Bush. Foreword by Roger Morris, who knows his way around this topic.

Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace (paperback, 2009, John Wiley & Sons): Second sequel to The Case for Israel, which may be the most deceitful book I've ever read. He followed that up with The Case for Peace, which was a pile of rationalizations for anything but. That Dershowitz, and Israel at least in his mind, has not the slightest desire for peace should be clear from who he targets as Israel's greatest enemy: Jimmy Carter.

Jenny Diski: The Sixties: Big Ideas, Small Books (paperback, 2009, Picador): Something of a memoir from London in the 1960s, which keeps her slightly removed from parochial US concerns like civil rights and Vietnam -- allowing her to focus on the important things, like sex and drugs. Seems to conclude that the "big ideas" of the '60s led to the bad ideas of the '80s. Easy to argue that, but harder to prove culpability.

Timothy Egan: The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Follow-up to Egan's bestselling book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. Again he takes an event that was legendary locally and had some political repercussions that he makes the most of: a forest fire in 1910 that burned some 3 million acres, bringing Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot into play.

Charles S Faddis: Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA (2009, Lyons Press): Another 20-year CIA vet with the usual load of FUBAR stories, the only surprise being that the book is remarkably slim (192 pp).

Tim Flannery: Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future (2009, Atlantic Monthly Press): Short (176 pp) book by a natural scientist, wrote a good book on North America called The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples and, more recently, one on climate change, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. This attempts a broadside, but isn't terribly convincing.

Lloyd C Gardner: Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East After World War II (2009, New Press): No real idea what the title refers to, but up to WWII the Middle East was ruled effectively by Britain through proxy monarchs, ranging from Farouk in Egypt to the Pahlavis in Iran. By the 1970s, the US had supplanted the British, and that's the point of this book. This follows, or perhaps fills in the background for, Gardner's recent The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of US Foreign Policy From the 1970s to the Present (New Press).

Al Gore: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (paperback, 2009, Rodale): Gore's sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. Still practical, still optimistic. No doubt features outstanding charts and illustrations. Amazon reviews are divided between 28 5-star and 27 1-star. Young reader's edition available, although it's probably already as simple as it can or should be.

David Ray Griffin: Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): Short book (120 pp), but the author doesn't claim to know the answer, even though he raises plenty of doubts. Still, it would be nice to know whether you've bumbled into a snark hunt, getting bumped and bruised and wasting your fortune in pursuit of nothing.

Donald Gutstein: Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy (paperback, 2009, Key Porter): The argument here seems to be that politicians don't become stooges for business interests because they're corrupt so much as because they're brainwashed. No doubt true, but that hardly proves they're not "greedy, corrupt, double-talking, and unqualified" as well. Indeed, those conditions seem to go together quite agreeably.

James Hansen: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009, Bloomsbury): The NASA scientist best known for pushing the science and issues related to global warming. This book raised some hackles by opposing the cap-and-trade schemes that politicians like -- at least the ones that take the issue seriously at all. Hansen is also the subject of Mark Bowen: Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

Tom Hayden: The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (2009, Paradigm): Claims Obama for the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements that brought Hayden to public attention. Seems like a stretch and a formula for disappointment, although Hayden was hardly alone in investing hope in Obama.

Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (2009, Penguin): Title indicates the fevered imperialist mindset. It's rather ridiculous to think that China could ever "rule the world" -- as well as presently unclear that China has any such intention. He means more like "when China corners the world's industrial capacity and stockpiles most of the world's money because China's the only country that invests in its labor." I suspect that even that will be self-correcting as other nations want to get in at the bottom, while the US is turning into a shell by getting out at the top, because the politicians here care more about profits than about workers.

John Lanchester: IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010, Simon & Schuster): I don't see the word in any of the review notes, but my impression is that this is about leverage. Politically convenient cheap credit has led to a mountain of highly leveraged investments that don't seem to be based on much of anything. Getting that money back is going to be difficult. Author started researching this for a novel, then decided truth is stranger, or maybe just more powerful, than fiction.

Yitzhak Laor: Myths of Liberal Zionism (2010, Verso): On the self-proclaimed "peace camp" Zionists, such as Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, a group that invariably rallies for each new Israeli military offensive, only to bemoan it once things go awry. Short (128 pp), probably scathing. The core problem is that the Liberal Zionists are more concerned with proving their Zionism than their commitment to peace or justice -- concepts that are disallowed by the very nature of Zionism.

Charles M Madigan: Destiny Calling: How the People Elected Barack Obama (2009, Ivan R Dee): Looks like this tries to move the election dynamics back to the grass roots, which would be a lot more refreshing and hopeful than, e.g., David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win.

Robert W McChesney/John Nichols: The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (2010, Nation Books): An Amazon ranter: "They insist that intelligent journalism will soon come to an end when the NYTimes goes belly-up." Looks to me like the NYTimes has become an example of the death of intelligent journalism. On the other hand, depending on corporations for basic info necessary for democracy has never worked very well. The authors have some ideas to move on, which probably don't involve the ranter's charge that they want a government-run Pravda.

Paul McGeough: Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas (2009, New Press): Starts with an event in 1997 seen as backfiring against Israel and promoting Hamas to prominence. Not sure why this vs. the 1996 assassination of "The Engineer" which led to Hamas retaliation that is generally regarded as tipping Israel's elections from Peres to Netanyahu, with disastrous results for the Oslo Peace Process.

Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (paperback, 2010, Picador): Starts with Oscar Wilde quote: "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." This distinction between price and value leads to many ideas that could upset the conventional apple cart of economics. Previously wrote on food, Stuffed and Starved. Naomi Klein raves about him.

Ami Pedahzur/Arie Perliger: Jewish Terrorism in Israel (2009, Columbia University Press): They backtrack to zealots in Roman times, and look at the Zionist use of terror in Israel's 1948 war, but there are contemporary examples as well -- efforts to solidify Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and to derail any peaceful accommodation with Palestinians.

William R Polk: Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, from Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyrus to Ahmadinejad (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Historian, longtime US diplomat, wrote a similar book primer Understanding Iraq a few years back, as well as a valuable comparative history of the pitfalls of occupation called Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq. A lot of people are sorely in need of such a book.

Peter Richardson: A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (2009, New Press): I don't know that I'd say that Ramparts changed America, but it was a big part of my life during my later teens, with nearly all of the issue covers on the cover clearly memorable. A lot of solid reporting, also a lot of attitude that wasn't always sound -- for one thing, we now realize that David Horowitz has long been mentally unstable.

Doug Rossinow: Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (2007; paperback, 2009, University of Pennsylvania Press): Covers 1880s-1940s, as various progressive and pro-labor strains merged into Rooseveltian liberalism.

Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice (2009, Belknap Press): Indian economist, perhaps an important philosophical thinker as well. Not sure what to make of it, and unlikely to try to tackle it head on. I have a copy of Development as Freedom, which has set unread on my shelf for quite a while now. Probably a good book.

Frederick J Sheehan: Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (2009, McGraw-Hill): Well, Greenspan's reputation didn't take long to drop into the toilet.

Ned Sublette: The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans (2009, Lawrence Hill): I'd rather he write that promised second volume of Cuba and Its Music, but I have his musical history of New Orleans awaiting my attention on the shelf, and I imagine he finds interesting things to say about recent (pre-Katrina) New Orleans as well.

David M Walker: Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility (2010, Random House): A popular book with the establishment: I see early rave reviews by Paul Volcker, Ross Perot, Bill Bradley, Paul O'Neill, Carls Hills, and Robert Rubin. "Nonpartisan, nonideological, and filled with a love of the country its esteemed author has spent his life serving." Among his nonideological "bold ideas": "control spending, save Social Security, dramatically alter Medicare, and simplify the tax code." Works for the Peter G. Petersen Foundation, in case you think you've heard all this before.

Ethan Watters: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010, Simon & Schuster): Argues that part of the cultural baggage we dump on the rest of the world includes our notions of mental illness and how it should be treated -- i.e., how we treat it. For example, he follows US trauma counselors to tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka, and psychopharmacologists everywhere, marketing diseases as well as drugs.

David Wessel: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (2009, Crown): The 2008 financial panic seen by focusing on the Fed. Don't know whether this makes Bernanke out to be a hero, which was the usual theme with Greenspan until the dam burst. Bernanke didn't choose this war; it was thrust upon him by the banking industry's self-inflicted collapse. Still, the fashion of making heroes out of Fed chiefs -- which goes back through Greenspan to Paul Volcker -- strikes me as dangerous, not to mention dishonest.

Richard Wolff: Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): Given the title, could have used a slightly grosser cover illustration -- the one they have shows a stack of Franklins scattering in the wind. Wolff is a Marxist economist, so he's in his moment.

Julian E Zelizer: Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security -- From World War II to the War on Terrorism (2009, Basic Books): Big history of US foreign policy, actually going back before WWII to include movements toward internationalism under McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson. Looks to me like it should focus more on arms sales, but that seems to be a secondary issue.

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John Lanchester: Bankocracy: Looking up info on Lanchester's IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, I ran across this review of two books about the Lehman Brothers failure. Good summary, worth noting.

I usually hold up these brief new book notes until I get 40, but sometimes don't notice until I get considerably more. This time I find myself with more than 40 left over after publishing 40 yesterday. Hence the double dose. More politics yesterday, since that's generally the focus, but I'm inclined to note any nonfiction that strikes my broad interests. Still have 54 left, so maybe a third part will follow.

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Dean Baker: False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (paperback, 2010, Polipoint Press): Cover photos of Bernanke, Greenspan, and Paulson, although I doubt that it ends there. Baker was one of the first to understand the bubble and what its collapse would mean. This looks to be a little more developed than his slim Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.

Robert J Barbera: The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing our Economic Future (2009, McGraw-Hill): Seems like a fairly establishment guy to go around badmouthing capitalism like that. Hyman Minsky follower, learning lessons from one bubble/panic to the next. Evidently a good deal more readable than Minsky's own recently reprinted Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.

Phyllis Bennis: Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): I saw this as a pamphlet several years ago, but at 208 pp. most likely this has been updated. Bennis has a bunch of primers like this, including Ending the Iraq War, Understanding the US-Iran Crisis, and most recently Ending the US War in Afghanistan (with David Wildman). She's very good at getting to the point.

Peter Berger/Anton Zijderveld: In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (2009, Harper One): Sociologists, authors respectively of The Social Construction of Reality and The Abstract Society, seek moderate, measured grounds on which to base contingent beliefs. I'd like to think I do this already, but I'm not so sure about everyone else.

Piers Brendon: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2008, Knopf): Big book (816 pp), natch. Nice to see that he dates the decline from the American Revolution: nice to think that we started off by doing something right. Most Brits note that the empire achieved its greatest growth later, but the hideous effect the British had on their subject peoples makes it all look like decline in one sense of another.

James Carroll: Practicing Catholic (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Son of an Air Force General, ordained as a Catholic priest, long-time Boston Globe columnist, has written major books on the Pentagon (House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power) and Catholic anti-semitism (Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews) -- deeply ingrained stains that he was evidently able to overcome without losing his religion.

David C Cassidy: Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb (2009, Bellevue Literary Press): A follow up to Cassidy's 1992 Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg with more info, especially on Heisenberg's controversial role in Nazi Germany's atom bomb project.

Lizzie Collingham: Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (paperback, 2007, Oxford University Press): A history of Indian cuisine in India and the world, with various comings and goings, compromises and coups. Less exploitative, more complex than an economic history.

Graham Farmelo: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (2009, Basic Books): One of the pioneering figures of quantum mechanics. I doubt that it's right to call him a "mystic," but I wouldn't bet against strange.

John Farmer: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 (2009, Penguin): A pretty detailed chronology of 9/11/2001, likely to be useful as reference if not much more. Author was involved in the official 9/11 report, so I'm not sure how much "untold" he has left to tell.

Howard Fineman: The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country (paperback, 2009, Random House): Who Is a Person? Who is an American? The Role of Faith; The Limits of Individualism; What Can We Know and Say? Who Judges the Law? Debt and Dollar; Local versus National Authority; Presidential Power; The Terms of Trade; War and Diplomacy; The Environment; A Fair, "More Perfect" Union. Mixed reviews on this, but sore losers abound.

Gary Giddins/Scott DeVeaux: Jazz (2009, WW Norton): This takes a bunch of famous jazz performances and tears them apart measure by measure, sometimes note by note. The technical level is way too much for me, but Giddins is one of the essential critics of our age, so I figured I had to pick up a copy. The records are also available in a 4-CD, evidently drawing on the Sony catalog, running about $60. I'd be real surprised if there's anything there I don't have somewhere, so it might be a good mixtape project -- when/if I get the nerve to delve deeper.

Louisa Gilder: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (2008, Knopf): Focuses on the further implications of quantum theory which started appearing with Bell's Theorem in 1964, the work of David Bohm, etc. Some fascinating science there, but I've never made much sense out of it, and too often it gets spun into a weird form of mysticism.

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (paperback, 2008, New Society): Archdruid, organic gardener, peak oil blogger. Not clear, but I suspect he sees the descent as future rather than already done, and that he sees it happening slowly as people adapt to alternative lifestyles like, uh, organic gardening. Similar: Sharon Astyk: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front; Pat Murphy: Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change; Lyle Estill: Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy; David Holmgren: Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change; better known is Bill McKibben: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Ralph Hassig/Kongdan Oh: Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom (2009, Rowman & Littlefield): Not much else available on this subject. We tend to reduce what little we learn into cartoon form -- South Park is a good example. Also new: Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009, Random House).

Hendrik Hertzberg: ¡Obámanos!: The Rise of a New Political Era (2009, Penguin): New Yorker political columnist, looks like he's recycling old essays and wrapping them up to look like something new. Includes something on "Palinopsia," which was probably his alternate title if McCain won. "Brouhaha" was about Clinton. I guess he had it covered.

Alexandra Horowitz: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (2009, Scribner): One of those topics you wonder about now and then. Seems like a good idea for a book, but how do we know that the author knows what dogs know? And even if someone knew all that, could it be communicated over an epistemological that is no doubt pretty broad?

Arif Jamal: Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (2009, Melville House): First thing to understand is that Kashmir is the bee in Pakistan's bonnet, and almost everything that Pakistan's security sector does is done with Kashmir (and India) in mind -- and it's tough to wrap your mind around that because it often makes little sense. The Kashmir conflict is little known, little understood -- well, it doesn't help that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense either.

William Kamkwamba/Bryan Mealer: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (2009, Morrow): Story of a 14-year-old boy in Malawi who built his own windmill, bringing electricity, power, and freedom to a small patch of the third world.

Robin DG Kelley: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009, Free Press): Likely to be the essential book on Monk, never a very straightforward subject.

Tracy Kidder: Strength in What Remains (2009, Random House): I've read two of Kidder's books: The Soul of a New Machine and House, both of which showed great skill at explaining technical challenges. His other work is more scattered, hard to characterize. This is the story of a student from Burundi who fled the mid-1990s war there (and more famously in neighboring Rwanda) for New York. Most likely a powerfully human story.

Jen Lin-Liu: Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China (paperback, 2009, Mariner Books): Chinese-American journalist tramps around China, attending cooking schools and checking in on the food industry. Includes some recipes.

Barry C Lynn: Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010, Wiley): Argues that the most dangerous trend in American business is the persistent move towards greater monopoly power. I think he's basically right here, and that this may be an important book. Author previously wrote End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, which I have on my shelf but unfortunately haven't gotten to.

Barry W Lynn: Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom (paperback, 2007, Three Rivers Press): Author is a minister in the United Church of Christ, concerned both about the politics and theology of the right-wing rush to make this a Christian Nation whether we like it or not.

Margaret MacMillan: Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2009, Modern Library): A short (208 pp.) book on how to lie with history, or how others have lied. A perennial favorite topic.

James E McWilliams: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (2009, Little Brown): Some backlash against the local foods movement, basically arguing that industrial agriculture isn't that bad -- at least that it has some useful economies of scale, and that there's some upside to genetic engineering.

Stephen L Melton: The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward) (2009, MBI): On the faculty at Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, which is why he sees his job as finding "a way forward." Otherwise, he's pretty effective at showing how nothing the Army is doing these days in Iraq and Afghanistan or pretty much anywhere else has a chance of working. Phrasing this as an argument with Clausewitz is rather obscure, perhaps to obfuscate the core point that the US Army has no worthwhile role in the modern world.

George Packer: Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Wonder how interesting they'd be if he actually understood them?

Ron Paul: End the Fed (2009, Grand Central): In the great debate between freshwater and saltwater economists, Paul sides with the Austrians, who'd gladly forego any kind of water in favor of heavy metals. I like Paul on some issues, and I'm not a fan of the Fed, but I find it really hard to take this seriously.

Scott Rosenberg: Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (2009, Crown): A history of the blog, or weblog for long, sort of a metablog. Author previously wrote Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, which seemed likely to be close enough (maybe too close) to its subject matter (but then I've run a lot of code through my dreams).

Jeff Rubin: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (2009, Random House): Economist and energy consultant, made his reputation predicting skyrocketing oil prices, and doubles down his bet here. Another new book in this vein is Christopher Steiner: $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. A hard change is coming.

Richard Sale: Clinton's Secret Wars: The Evolution of a Commander in Chief (2009, Thomas Dunne): When you do the math Clinton engaged in overt and covert wars about as often as the Bushes before and after, although not as flamboyantly as the latter. Sale concludes that by the end of his term Clinton was a "tough-as-nails" commander in chief "in the same vein as Ronald Reagan" (who did more saber-rattling but less actual warmaking). Instead of rolling back the cold war, Clinton kept the military and the CIA back in play, setting up the precedence and expectations that G.W. Bush capitalized on. This is ugly stuff, but probably not a critical writer.

Michael J Sandel: Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosopher, hacks his way through the long history of thinking on ethics and justice. Looks like a reasonable presentation, worthy of some thought.

Dan Senor/Saul Singer: Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (2009, Twelve): Senor, you may recall, was the US Army PR flak in charge of bullshitting the media about the US occupation of Iraq. Now a "senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations," he's got a new client and a new line of . . .

Bill Streever: Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (2009, Little Brown): First-person experiences in extreme cold places, a physical state that is surprisingly alien to our experience. How well this works depends on how well he ties it all together, but one hint is that global warming shows its most profound effects in the cold.

Tristram Stuart: Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (2009, WW Norton): Looks all over the world food industry to see how much waste there is, and why. Much as the cheapest way to salvage energy is conservation, a good part of dealing with future hunger may be in wringing the inefficiencies out of our current vastly wasteful system.

Terry Teachout: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Major new biography of Armstrong, always a subject of interest and fascination.

Ann Vileisis: Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back (2007, Island Press): The loss has much to do with food processors acting as increasingly opaque mediators between farm and table, a business shift advanced by urbanization. The interesting thing here will be explaining why it matters.

Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009, Basic Books): One of many books trying to sort out the differentiator that distinguished human evolution -- another is Derek Bickerton: Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. Probably more interesting for its analysis of how cooking changed eating. Closely related: Francis D Burton: Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution.

Leonard Zeskind: Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Focuses on Willis Carto, William Pierce, and David Duke, who don't strike me as all that mainstream (although other names I see, like Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson, are more so). Author knows this stuff and has written a fat (672 pp) book on the subject.

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Previously mentioned books (book pages noted where available), new in paperback:

HW Brands: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008; paperback, 2009, Anchor): Actually, missed this one earlier, but bought it and read it, so I figure I should note it. Big book (912 pp), but I also recently read Ann Hagedorn's big book on 1919 (Savage Peace) and Adam Cohen's book on FDR's first 100 days (Nothing to Fear), and can attest that Brands covered the overlap with remarkably accurate succinctness. Filled in a lot of background I lacked, both on FDR's early interests in politics and on his dedication to plunging the US into WWII. I gather that Jean Edward Smith's FDR covers the same ground and detail equally well.

Tony Horwitz: A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America (2008; paperback, 2009, Picador): Seems like one of those writers who tells a good history yarn by tracing his travels the various spots -- cf. a previous title, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. [book page]

Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance of the Middle East (2009; paperback, 2010, Beacon Press): Shows how the US imposed its neuroses onto the Middle East -- a paranoia over communism that put us in bed with Islamic jihadists, a messianic embrace of Israeli and apocalypse that put us on the outs, an obsession with oil and money, and with our own military omnipotence, no matter how often it failed. [book page]

George E Lewis: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008; paperback, 2009, University of Chicago Press): Most likely a major book on the development of avant-garde jazz in the 1970s, told by a major figure in his own right.

Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008; paperback, 2009, Penguin Press): Big bestseller, consolidating his arguments from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Overdue for a books post. Actually, I have enough material for two, so this is the first installment, with another soon. Some emphasis on politics and money this time, but I certainly didn't bag them all.

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Dan Balz/Haynes Johnson: The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (2009, Viking): Looks like this 2008's The Making of the President. Given that it was just about the only political story of 2008 that was adequately (indeed, excessively) covered in real time, I doubt that they have much to add.

William K Black: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (paperback, 2005, University of Texas Press): A couple years old and looking back on several scandals ago, but the title is as true as ever, and the lessons evidently still haven't been learned.

Taylor Branch: The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009, Simon & Schuster): The great historian of the civil rights movement sat down with Clinton 79 times to keep a contemporary record of Clinton's sense of his own history. This book is evidently not the verbatim tapes but Branch's comments from each session. Not quite primary sources, but not far removed either.

Christopher Buckley: Losing Mum and Pup (2009, Twelve): The author's famous parents died 11 months apart, triggering this memoir. As mine died three months and three days apart, I can relate, although our sets of parents had nothing at all in common. The Buckleys were born filthy rich, and spent their whole lives in fervent ideological celebration of their good fortune. The son somehow found a sense of humor in this, which sometimes helps him overcome his upbringing.

John Cassidy: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Another book on the financial collapse of 2008, focusing mostly on the shortcomings of conventional economic theory -- all that stuff about robust, rational, reliable, all-seeing and benificent markets. What he calls Utopian Economics.

Kathleen Christison/Bill Christison: Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (paperback, 2009, Pluto Press): Short book with 50 photographs depicting life in the Occupied Territories.

Stephen S Cohen/J Bradford DeLong: The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money (2010, Basic Books): Well, China, for instance, as opposed to the US, which used to be the world's banker but isn't even its own these days. Short book (176 pp.), simple point.

David Cole, ed: The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (paperback, 2009, New Press): Given the intellects involved, I wouldn't call what they did unthinkable; shameful, of course, and unconscionable, criminal even. Seems like a lot of these memos have made the rounds already.

John Derbyshire: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009, Crown Forum): Author has previously tended to write about math, although he also wrote a novel about Calvin Coolidge. Attitude here is refreshing in a world which has been, in Barbara Ehrenreich's term, bright-sided. I wouldn't have any trouble taking the same theme and running it from the left. Still, I'd be missing out on some inadvertent humor. For instance, Amazon's "frequently bought together" pairs this with Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life. Customers also bought Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous, and for that matter, Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Rosemarie M Esber: Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians (paperback, 2009, Arabicus): Another in-depth (448 pp.) run through the Palestinian disaster of 1948-49, drawing on details from both sides. Ilan Pappe covers similar ground, more briefly, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009, Metropolitan): Surgeon-writer, has written a couple of good books and some good essays on practicing his craft, especially on learning to do it better. Argues that checklists not only help but are essential for not screwing up, especially in complex, harried tasks, which include but are hardly limited to surgery.

John Gibson: How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History (2009, Harper Collins): Funniest book title of late. I especially love the list of things the left misrepresented Bush on: "his response to 9/11, the Iraq War, warrantless wiretapping, enhanced interrogation techniques, the Surge, uranium from Niger, the number of deaths in Iraq, the federal response to Katrina, and much, much more." Gibson claims that "Bush's performance was much better than most people now believe." Imagine that.

George Gilder: The Israel Test (2009, Richard Vigilante): Do you have what it takes to uncritically support Israel? Can you write: "Tiny Israel stands behind only the United States in its contributions to the hi-tech economy. Israel has become the world's paramount example of the blessings of freedom." Or do you prefer "murderous regimes sustained by envy and Nazi ideology" and "a Marxist zero-sum-game theory of economics [which] has fueled the anti-Semitic ranting of Hitler, Arafat, bin Laden and history's other notorious haters"? I mean, if you have any second thoughts about Israel, how can we be sure you'll line up for all the other Middle East wars we have lined up?

Richard N Haass: War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (2009, Simon & Schuster): A realist functionary in both Bush administrations, a fan of the first Iraq war, a critic of the second, unable to see the connections, e.g., how the first war led to the second.

Victor Davis Hanson: How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security (2009, Encounter): One of a series of short "broadsides" (this one is 48 pp.) slandering Obama. I just picked this one out because it's probably the most vacuous. Others include: John Fund: How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections; David Gratzer: Why Obama's Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster; Stephen Moore: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting the US Economy; Andrew C McCarthy: How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice; and, of course, Michael A Ledeen: Obama's Betrayal of Israel.

Ron Haskins/Isabel V Sawhill: Creating an Opportunity Society (paperback, 2009, Brookings Institution Press): Haskins was a Bush staff adviser on social policy, since moved on to Brookings. He also wrote, Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill. Sawhill, also at Brookings, has co-edited a book with Alice Rivlin, Restoring Fiscal Sanity. So I figure these for pretty conservative types, but Yglesias recommended this, arguing that how can you study inequality without moving to the left?

John Heilemann/Mark Halperin: Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010, Harper): Dirt on the campaign trail. It's not like you really thought any of these people were normal.

James Hoggan/Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (paperback, 2009, Douglas & McIntyre): I basically accept the global warming hypothesis, but what I'm more certain of is that the disinformation campaign of business and political interests is way off base, so this book at least should be on relatively firm ground.

Asgeir Jonsson: Why Iceland?: How One of the World's Smallest Countries Became the Meltdown's Biggest Casualty (2009, McGraw-Hill): Interesting case study, although both the extreme boom and the bust were exaggerated by the tiny size of the economy.

Antonia Juhasz: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -- and What We Must Do to Stop It (2008; paperback, 2009, Harper): Easy enough to paint the oil industry as evil, especially if you go back to Rockefeller and cram it all into 480 pages. Author previously wrote The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.

Zachary Karabell: Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It (2009, Simon & Schuster): Historian, last two books focused on the Middle East, but before that he did books on Chester Arthur and Harry Truman, so he jumps around. The idea of looking at China and America as one co-dependent economy is interesting, and a good history would be useful.

Richard Kim/Betsy Reed, eds: Going Rouge: An American Nightmare (paperback, 2009, Health Communications): A rip-off, of course, the most obvious difference from the bestseller it mimics is the gloomy sky behind Palin's crazed gaze into space. Note that at least two other books hit on the same title: Bob Silber's Going Rouge: A Candid Look Inside the Mind of Political Conservative Sarah Palin and Julie Sigwart's Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book. Still, when I googled the book title, the search engine served up "going rogue" instead. I've seen it suggest more common alternatives, but never substitute one before.

Amanda Little: Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells -- Our Ride to the Renewable Future (2009, Harper): A travelogue of sorts through how we produce and consume energy, realistic enough to recognize the big problems, optimistic enough to think we can handle them. I wouldn't want to say she's wrong.

Frank I Luntz: What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears (2009, Hyperion): Republican pollster, strategist, weasel worder -- previous book: Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. Could be a useful book if he manages to explain what really drives people to the right as opposed to the mostly idiotic ideologies they find once they get there.

Alfred W McCoy: Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009, University of Wisconsin Press): Big book (672 pp) on the US experience in the Philippines, starting with 1898 and the counterinsurgency from then to 1913 then returning periodically as the Philippines required further imperial policing, with side glances at what all that meant for democracy at home. Author has also written: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Alfred W McCoy/Francisco A Scarano, eds: Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (paperback, 2009, University of Wisconsin Press): Scattered papers, many on the Philippines and Cuba, where the US first got used to the idea and perils of empire, with occasional nods toward Iraq.

Charles R Morris: The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets (2009, Public Affairs): Author of one of the better books on the crash, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (doubling the tab for the paperback edition). I'm rather tired of putting finance people on pedestals, although these three are a bit off the beaten path. Still, two of them are primarily known for the basest of reasons: obscene riches.

Greg Mortensen: Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009, Viking): One-time mountaineer, saw a need and starting building schools in rural Pakistan, leading to the book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. This updates the story, including a massive earthquake and the political upheaval of the Taliban. I've always been leery about charitable efforts inside US war zones because they inevitably mix up the messages, although I don't doubt that what he's doing there is more appreciated than Richard Holbrooke's contribution.

Bethany Moreton: To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009, Harvard University Press): Places Wal-Mart in the framework of right-wing Christian movement -- don't know how far it does into other businesses, but there is room to explore how Wal-Mart can get away with its business practices.

David Owen: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability (2009, Riverhead): New Yorker writer, Connecticut suburb dweller, has written a bunch of books on housebuilding (marvelous) and golf (who cares?). Seems to argue that the bigger the city the better. Conversely, he points out that green-tinged pastoralism doesn't really make much difference.

Robert Palmer: Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (2009, Scribner): Posthumous anthology, edited by Anthony DeCurtis. Not sure what all is in here, but Palmer is one of the more important historian/critics of early rock and roll and its precursors -- Palmer's Deep Blues is one of the best known books on the subject.

Michael Pollan: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (paperback, 2009, Penguin): After his important, and bestselling, food book The Omnivore's Dilemma, he seems determined to reduce the essential points, first in In Defense of Food and now in this 112-page "pocket guide." Also has a recent children's edition of Omnivore's Dilemma. Also has a recent reissue of an old book, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, that strikes my fancies much more.

David Ransom/Vanessa Baird, eds: People-First Economics: Making a Clean Start for Jobs, Justice and Climate (paperback, 2009, World Changing): Contributions by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Susan George, Walden Bello, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Evo Morales.

Wayne Allyn Root: The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gambling & Tax Cuts (2009, John Wiley & Sons): Uh, drugs; you forgot drugs. Gotta have drugs to be free, not to mention solvent.

Arundhati Roy: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009, Haymarket): Essay collection, mostly on Indian politics, which is troubled on several accounts.

Joe Sacco: Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (2009, Metropolitan): The history of a couple of incidents in Gaza under cover of the 1956 Suez War, one leaving 111 Palestinians dead and casting a long shadow on the subsequent occupation. Sacco has been doing this sort of thing for a while. He has a previous graphic "novel" called Palestine, and others, including Safe Area Goradze: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves (2009, Viking): Most likely one of the more important histories of the financial debacle of 2008, focusing on the politics of Washington basically in thrall to Wall Street.

Joseph E Stiglitz: Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010, WW Norton): Been waiting for him to weigh in on the global meltdown, and this is it. Reading a long review at Amazon it looks to me like he caught just about everything.

Benjamin Tupper: Welcome To Afghanistan: Send More Ammo: The Tragicomic Art of Making War as an Embedded Trainer in the Afghan National Army (paperback, 2009, Epigraph): I don't usually post these soldier chronicles, figuring the soldiers are the most ignorant and least interesting people writing, so take this with a grain of salt, but be free to wonder how all this is supposed to work out. I've lost count of soldier books on Iraq, but Afghanistan is more sparsely documented. Some titles include: Mark W Bromwich: Captains Blog: The Chronicles of My Afghan Vacation; Jeff Courter: Afghan Journal: A Soldier's Year in Afghanistan; Joe LeBleu: Long Rifle: A Sniper's Story in Iraq and Afghanistan; Platte B Moring III: Honor First: A Citizen-Soldier in Afghanistan; Craig M Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education; Mike Ryan: Battlefield Afghanistan; Doug Stanton: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan; Regulo Zapata Jr: Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier; more grandiosely, Dalton Fury: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man; also, Vladislav Tamarov: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story; and, what the hell, Ali Ahmad Jalali: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters.

Ben White: Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide (paperback, 2009, Pluto Press): Short (144 pp), case is pretty straightforward, don't you think?

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Will do paperback reissues next time.

Matthew Yglesias: The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson. I'm reading Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919, which hasn't had much to say about Wilson in the first 100 pages, but no doubt will. Meanwhile, much of what I know about Wilson was gleaned from Walter Karp's The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered the Political Life of the American Republic (1890-1920), which depicts Wilson as a pseudo-reformer and an inveterate two-faced schemer, especially in his efforts to plunge America into World War. (Actually, I'm sure I've read more on Wilson, especially William Appleman Williams, but that was long ago. James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong also features Wilson, practically on the first page.) Still, this post is a good precis, even though it leaves out a lot of details -- like two wars against Mexico. (Pershing's slog through Mexico in search of Pancho Villa is a pretty close precedent to the fruitless search for Bin Laden. Villa, like Bin Laden, had attacked US territory [a town in New Mexico]. Wilson, like Bush, responded with a massive retaliatory invasion, which never found Villa, and eventually returned empty handed. The only difference was that Pershing was so inept he didn't even manage to destroy Mexico. That was more the point of Wilson's Veracruz invasion, but that ultimately accomplished nothing either.)

You can make interesting cases comparing Wilson to two later US presidents. Like Clinton, he won a first term with the Republican Party split, then leveraged his incumbency for a second diastrous term. Even though Clinton got impeached, Wilson was actually far more unpopular: only Richard Nixon had a more disastrous second term. Like Nixon, Wilson implemented, or preëmpted, much of the other party's reform proposals, while administratively doing his best to undermine them. Like Nixon, Wilson had grandiose designs for foreign policy. Like Nixon, those designs involved all sorts of surrepetitious military adventures, massive propaganda, and major efforts to undermine civil liberties. Wilson's reputation today is based mostly on his usefulness to FDR and his cold war successors in turning American foreign policy from isolationism to interventionism: Wilson symbolized a path not taken, which supposedly would have changed the course of history, preventing a second world war and all that came with it. That's a fantasy which is hard to sustain once you look at what Wilson actually did, which is why so much of his record is forgotten, and should be recalled.

I've been reading a series of books that started in Afghanistan then led to Pakistan and finally to India. One of these is Ramchandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. It's a big book on a subject I know a little but not a lot on. There's an interesting chapter on Nehru's foreign policy, which was determinedly neutral in the Cold War, which is to say it completely failed the then-current version of Bush's "you're either with us or against us" test. We learn that Dean Acheson despised Nehru, and John Foster Dulles regarded him as yet another enemy. Then the following Nehru quote pops up, from a letter to industrialist G.D. Birla in May 1954 (p. 169):

I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another. . . . They think that they can solve any problem with money and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.

The only thing wrong with that statement today is that you need to adjust the timespan out to about sixty years, although the last five or six (or eight) are easily the worst. What's striking here is not the judgment but the reasoning. We're still trying to settle everything with money and arms. We still can't understand why people resent doing our bidding, and resent our attitude that the only concerns that matter are ours. Nehru was a smart guy, but he didn't figure that out because he was smart. He recognized the pattern from coming of age under the British Empire.

One curious thing is that more often than not the Americans didn't have a clue what they really wanted, nor any idea what would come as a consequence of their actions. The US had already made fateful moves in Vietnam, in Iran, and in Pakistan, but who in the US had any idea how those moves would blowback? Nehru may not have understood that far in the future either, but he was completely right that what we were doing was wrong.

Time for another quick list of 40 more/less new books of likely interest if anyone had that kind of time. Last time I did this was September 23. The whole kit and kaboodle is here. Probably have enough left over I could post another sooner rather than later.

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Karen Armstrong: The Case for God (2009, Knopf): Probably the best recent writer on the history and historical abuse of religion, she's long hinted that she sees religion as a deep-felt human need. Most likely that's her case, and the history will, once again, be impeccable.

Campbell Craig/Sergey S Radchenko: The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (2008, Yale University Press): The real roots are slightly deeper, but the atomic bomb was one of the initial sticking points in US-Soviet relations. Covered from both sides, as it needs to be.

Campbell Craig/Fredrik Logevall: America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (2009, Belknap Press): Argues that American war planners were unable to shake an insecurity complex which led them to distorted and perverse cold war policies. No doubt that there is something to this, but it's also true that at ever stage the US had dominating firepower and was able to aggressively project and assert that power far around the world. American insecurity was more psychological than anything else, perhaps rooted in fears about the viability of capitalism.

R. Crumb: The Book of Genesis Illustrated (2009, WW Norton): Reportedly favors a very literal translation, consistent with straightforward illustration, as much as may be possible with the source material, which has always struck me as, well, a little weird.

Mark Danner: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (2009, Nation Books): A collection of essays (656 pp) covering a couple decades of war reporting, from El Salvador and Haiti to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he paid special attention to Abu Ghraib.

Morris Dickstein: Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009, WW Norton): Big survey (624 pp), but a big subject, especially with all the music and literature. Helped that the New Deal made a point of supporting artists, and that they managed to do it while getting and giving relatively little flack.

Morgan Downey: Oil 101 (2009, Wooden Table Press): Runs 452 pages, the first 30 "A brief history of oil," then on to crude oil assays, components, chemistry, exploration, production, refining, standards, finished products, etc., plus 100+ pages on markets and prices. Looks like it hits Einstein's dictum of being as simple as possible, but no simpler than it has to be. Doesn't seem to have any agenda. Reportedly essential.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009, Metropolitan): I suppose you could call this "The Bright Side of the Dark Ages." One problem with positive thinking is when it functions as denial; another is how it personalizes problems. In some ways this seems trivial, but Ehrenreich is a profound critic of this sort of thing -- indeed, of most sorts of things.

Marc Ellis: Judaism Does Not Equal Israel: The Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic (2009, New Press): Another in what's quickly growing into a bookshelf of books trying to put some distance between Judaism and Israel. Ellis sees this as a loss of Jewish sense of a "prophetic mission" to a narrative based on the intoxication of power, from the Holocaust and the Israeli military state.

David Hackett Fischer: Champlain's Dream (2008, Simon & Schuster): The key figure in the French discovery of America, regrettably omitted from Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange, although Horwitz wrote a review quoted on Amazon's page. Found the book a bit dull, which is too bad given that Champlain and France had a distinct approach to the Americas.

Aaron Glantz: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (2009, University of California Press): Follows US veterans home after previously writing Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations, and before that How America Lost Iraq, which I recall as the first book to figure that out.

Michael D Gordin: Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Another look at the Soviet Union's first atom bomb test, more concerned with its political ramifications than with the technical details.

DD Guttenplan: American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): One of the things I did as a teenager that formed my politics was to subscribe to IF Stone's Weekly, so I always regarded Stone as some kind of saint. Seems like these days people like to harp on Stone's complicated handling of the Sovet Union as if it's still important to score points against anyone who wasn't staunchly anti-Stalin. Given how destructive American anticommunism turned out, I find it hard to nitpick.

Steven F Hayward: The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989 (2009, Crown Forum): Second big (768 pp) volume under that rubric. Don't know whether a third volume is in the works: Reagan was pretty much done even before he left office, but his cult has never let up in their campaign to beatify and deify him. Hayward is part of that cult, clearly show in a previous book title: Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders. (Another memorable Hayward title: The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry.)

Richard Heinberg: Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (paperback, 2009, New Society): One of the most persuasive authors on peak oil and what it means, especially why alternative energy sources are at best a limited answer, takes on the biggest and blackest: coal. Should be a very dirty read.

David Hoffman: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (2009, Doubleday): Not sure whether this is a general history of the arms race and its bizarre mentality or whether it just focuses on the "untold" parts, which seem to have a lot to do with chemican and biological weapons. Either way, likely to be useful for understanding the waste and folly of the cold war.

Alistair Horne: Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year (2009, Simon & Schuster): Actually, the crucial year will be the one Kissinger spends in the Hague.

Fred Jerome: Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East (2009, St Martin's Press): I've long known that Einstein turned down an invitation to Israel, settling in New Jersey instead. This fleshes the story out further. Jerome previously wrote Einstein on Race and Racism.

Fred Kaplan: 1959: The Year That Changed Everything (2009, Wiley): Evidently takes the view that the 1960s started a year earlier and hinged on crucial events in 1959, specifically citing birth control pills, microchips, and the first US soldiers killed in Vietnam, but also noting "Kind of Blue" -- Kaplan is something of a jazz critic on the side, his main beat being the military-industrial complex.

Steven D Levitt/Stephen J Dubner: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009, William Morrow): With a huge bestseller setting expectations, they've gone back to the well for more profitable contrariness, but seem to have come up with a load of crap -- their efforts to go against the grain of climate research have drawn a lot of fire for their sloppy scholarship. Makes you wonder about the whole bag, even if the previous book was actually based on some of their own research.

James W Loewen: Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History (paperback, 2009, Teachers College Press): Author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, and Sunset Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism -- books that have got quite a few people to rethink what they thought they knew.

Eric S Margolis: American Raj: America and the Muslim World (2008; paperback, 2009, Key Porter): The implication is not only that the US has superseded Britain not only in its imperial function but in its structure. Author previously wrote War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, which has been through a couple of editions.

Lawrence G McDonald/Patrick Robinson: A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (2009, Crown): Significant because the Lehman bankruptcy was the single most traumatic event of the financial collapse of 2008. Insiders might know something about that, but most of what happened lies elsewhere, including the political decision to let Lehman collapse. A lot of inside stories are coming out, including: Joseph Tibman: The Murder of Lehman Brothers: An Insider's Look at the Global Meltdown, and Andrew Ross Sorkin: Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves.

John Mueller: Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (2009, Oxford University Press): No doubt there's been some hysteria worth debunking, especially along the lines of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud quip, but there's also plenty of room for serious concern about atomic weapons. The bit I most worry about is the effort to preserve the practice of conventional warfare in an age when such war should be as unthinkable as nuclear holocaust. Author previously wrote Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Ralph Nader: "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" (2009, Seven Stories Press): Fiction, probably not compelling as literature, more like a disguised political tract, and for that matter one fluffed up to 736 pp. Wouldn't mention it but I'm not sure he's wrong. Moreover, I don't like the odds.

Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne): Bumps up against a pet peeve of mine: if heroin is bankrolling the Taliban, why not just legalize poppy growing and let legitimate sources drive the excess profits out of the market? [book page]

Rufus Phillips: Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (2008, Naval Institute Press): A protege of Edward Lansdale, Phillips was involved in US actions in South Vietnam from the beginning, and recognized its imminent failure. For proof that the lessons were not learned, Phillips draws analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bernard Porter: The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (paperback, 2006, Oxford University Press): This looks at what people back in Britain thought and cared about their bloody empire, and the answer seems, interestingly enough, to be not much.

Ronald Radosh/Allis Radosh: A Safe Haven: Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel (2009, Harper): An attempt to whitewash Truman as a founding Zionist hero of the Jewish State, similar to Martin Gilbert's Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship. A more balanced and nuanced view would be much more interesting.

Barnett R Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2nd ed, paperback, 2002, Yale University Press): A bit dated, but Afghanistan's inability to form viable state institutions seems timeless. Rubin was a generally astute critic of Bush policy in Afghanistan, but he seems to have disappeared lately, sucked up in Holbrooke's inner circle, where's he's likely a frustrated voice for reason.

Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People (2009, Verso): A bestseller in Israel, where it challenged various myths about just who it was returning to the promised land: in particular, argues that Ashkenazi Jews mostly derive from converts under the Khazar Empire. That in itself matters less than the use of Jewish identity in the forming of Israel, where myth turned into something deeply troubling.

Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt): Tramping around Pakistan, not necessarily in the safest regions either, gives a young journalist a sense of mortality and a curious look at an important nation we poorly understand. [book page]

Neil Sheehan: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (2009, Random House): Basically the story of developing ICBMs as the alternative to Curtis LeMay's SAC bombers. Sheehan claims that Schriever, a USAF general who pushed the missile programs, with keeping the peace, but it strikes me that he merely took war to a more elevated level of antireality.

Avi Shlaim: Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2008, Knopf; paperback, 2009, Vintage): Major biography of Jordan's King Hussein, who played a major role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in many ways straddling both sides while cashing checks on the CIA payroll. One thing I've long wondered was whether Hussein entered the 1967 War intending to lose the West Bank and thereby rid himself of Palestinian threats to his dynasty. I doubt if that's answered here.

Avi Shlaim: Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations (2009, Verso): Essay collection, from one of Israel's most important "revisionist" historians, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

Lewis Sorley: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (paperback, 2007, Harvest Books): This book has gotten attention of late, especially from Af-Pak War hawks who believe that all we need to win in Afghanistan is a better military strategy and blank check support back home. Focuses on Gen. Creighton Abrams, also the subject of Sorley's Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times, who was allegedly turning the Vietnam war around before the peaceniks back home stabbed him in the back.

William T Vollmann: Imperial (2009, Viking): Huge (1306 pp) book about the Imperial Valley in the southeast corner of California and adjacent Mexico, best known for the accidental Salton Sea. I hadn't noticed Vollmann until I saw Poor People in the nonfiction section, but I gather he's a novelist of some importance and much verbosity who spits out mammoth nonfiction tomes on the side -- another one called Rising Up and Rising Down runs to 3,352 pages in 7 volumes.

William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959; 50th Anniversary Edition, paperback, 2009, WW Norton): The classic first look at the underside of US foreign policy. New forword by Lloyd C Gardner, and new afterword by Andrew Bacevich. Williams personally trained a whole generation of critical historians. Bacevich came to Williams late, but also wrote the introduction to the 2006 reprint of Empire as a Way of Life.

Gordon S Wood: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009, Oxford University Press): A new slab in the multi-author Oxford History of the United States, following Robert Middlekauff's entry for 1763-1789. Wood previously specialized in the revolutionary period, so it will be interesting to see how he moves forward. At 800 pages, probably magnificent.

Slavoj Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (paperback, 2009, Verso): A short (96 pp) takeoff on the famous Marx quote, which originally referred to the Napoleons, this time applied to the triumphs and failures of neoliberal capitalism. Zizek is a Slovenian psychologist-philosopher with quite a bit recently published in English, including (working backwards to 9/11 and probably missing some): In Defense of Lost Causes; The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?; The Sublime Object of Ideology; Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books; For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor; Enjoy Your Symptoms: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out; The Universal Exception; The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters; How to Read Lacan; Interrogating the Real; The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality; Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible; Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences; The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity; Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates; plus some commentaries on Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Robespierre. Probably a similar number of earlier books.

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Previously mentioned books (book pages noted where available), new in paperback:

Kenneth S Deffeyes: Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (2001; new edition, paperback, 2008, Princeton University Press): Ex-Shell Oil geologist, teaches at Princeton, was John McPhee's guide for his first marvelous geology book, Basin and Range, introduced the concept of "peak oil" in the first edition of this book, and followed it up with the more general Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak in 2005. Deffeyes predicted a peak in 2004-2008, so presumably the new edition refines that prediction. A couple of global recessions since the first edition appeared suppressed demand, as did a couple of historic price run-ups. Hubbert's US peak was much more clearcut because slacking US production could painlessly (or so it seemed) be replaced from foreign sources. The same isn't true of world production, so we should expect the sort of chaos at the peak that we are in fact seeing.

Gordon M Goldstein: Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (2008; paperback, 2009, Holt): Looks at the push to escalate US involvement in Vietnam through the prism of McGeorge Bundy's post-MacNamara revisionist memory. Thankfully, Bundy died before he could whitewash this, but Bundy did manage to keep the focus on what presidents want as opposed to what their stupid advisers tell them. [book page]

Steven D Levitt/Stephen J Dubner: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005; paperback, 2009, Harper Perennial): Not sure what the new material for the long-awaited paperback is: maybe why it takes four years to turn a much-in-demand hardcover bestseller into a paperback. But probably doesn't have much new, unless they explain why they saved the good stuff for the hardcover sequel coming out October 20: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Most likely I'll wait for the paperback again; may even get so used to waiting I wait a little longer.

Kapil Komireddi: Indian Winter: A little bit about the prospects of turning Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire into a movie. I can't really see Hugh Grant in the role of Lord Louis Mountbatten, last viceroy and first governor-general of India -- Clive Owen maybe. Hard to improve on Cate Blanchett as Lady Mountbatten. Still, the bigger problem is that it will be all but impossible for a movie based on the principal characters not to compound the book's most serious weakness, which is that it makes so much history turn on the actions of a small number of larger-than-life figures: the Mountbattens, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Churchill. The book tends to fall into the Great Man bag, even if the greatest figure on that list is the Lady. This approach isn't without its insights. In particular, the intense personal dislike between Louis Mountbatten and Jinnah seems to have preceded the prejudice that Mountbatten showed against Pakistan in dividing the empire. On the other hand, it reduces Pakistan to a personal delusion of Jinnah, as if there was nothing more behind it than the ambitions of one determined politician. And it leaves the eruptions of violence mostly unexplained, since they don't much figure into the actions or programs of the principal figures. I finished the book grateful for what I learned but with so many residual questions I wanted to read further.

The "secret history" has much to do with the Mountbattens, but remains rather discreet about Edwina's romance with Nehru. The movie, of course, even if they don't take liberties with the record will inevitably render the affair so explicit as to be undeniable -- and needless to say, the cash register bets that they will go further. And there's the rub. I've seen a dozen or more major movies about India over the last couple of decades, and all ultimately portrayed India in positively glowing terms. I hadn't realized that this is to some extent a consequence of the censorship rights the Indian government demands as part of the price to film there. Despite its much ballyhooed boast to be the world's largest democracy, India is tightly controlled by Nehru's direct heirs, who don't take kindly to publicizing Nehru's dalliance with a foreign woman -- something Nehru himself was very circumspect about. Komireddi does a good job of explaining how this works. Indeed, his notes on the proliferation of Nehru-Gandhi names reminds me of the Ronald Reagan sanctification project here.

For much more from the book, look here.

I notice that I have a bunch of book pages typed up that I haven't posted anything on here in the blog. These are books that I got from the library, read quickly, typing up more or less extensive quotes as I went through them, but in most cases not a lot of comments. One could, in theory, go back and annotate them further. I like having the quotes accessible, especially since the books aren't. And typing is something I have a lot of practice doing, having spent a good chunk of my worklife in typesetting shops. I think there's even a sort of cognitive advantage in not just reading but typing.

The books:

• Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (2009, Random House): Key insight is that Jihadism posits a war on a cosmic plane where it is impossible to defeat. Winning against a cosmically projected war is more a matter of returning to reality. Unfortunately, much of the US Global War on Terror is similarly cosmic, equally ungrounded in reality.

• Alan Beattie: False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World (2009, Riverhead): A spotty, impressionistic, somewhat contrarian survey of how some nations developed better than other nations, starting with a long riff on Argentina vs. United States.

• Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (2009, Penguin Press): Focuses on FDR's first 100 days, and on five key advisers who influenced FDR in that period: Lewis Douglas, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and Harry Hopkins.

• Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): A quick tour of the Middle East, focusing on hot spots and problem areas, starting with a piece on oil and winding up in Pakistan.

• Diane Dumanoski: The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Out Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (2009, Crown): A book on the effects of climate change. Overreliant, I think, on James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis.

• Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008, Knopf): War reporting, mostly from Iraq, with an opening section from pre-2001 Afghanistan. Not a very sensitive observer, let alone critic, of the war, but a vivid writer with a fair share of atrocity stories.

• Betty Fussell: Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (2008, Houghton Mifflin): In depth look at the American beef industry, from someone who still eats steak and throws in some recipes at the end.

• Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War, Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008, Free Press): Somewhat simplistic survey of the military-industrial complex, sympathetic to Eisenhower, excessively so.

• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne): In-depth look at the drug angle in the Afghanistan war. Unfortunately, her angle takes her to conclusions that only serve to propagate the war.

• Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt): Good background history of Pakistan embedded in a travelogue that takes the author to some of the most dangerous places in the country, ultimately getting him kicked out.

There are a couple more books I'll try to get to soon.

William Astore: Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now: Within a year of the US invasion, Iraq was reminding Americans of a certain age of a certain familiar quagmire in southeast Asia. Any such historical comparison is bound to have as many variances as similarities, which makes for fruitless debate as the apples and oranges glide by in their own quantum orbits. The real question isn't whether the whole comparison fits. It's whether we've learned lessons from the past experience. The Iraq-Vietnam analogies wound up fading, mostly for two reasons: one is that the anti-American forces were never able to unite over a Sunni-Shiite divide that the US actually did much to exacerbate; the other is that the Shiite-dominated government was able to consolidate a power base that the puppets in Saigon never managed. As such, the US military, with its penchant to turn everywhere it bombs into Vietnams, faded into the background, taking its quagmire with it.

On the other hand, Vietnam-Afghanistan analogies are booming. Of course, there are differences, but one similarity stands out, and it is the one that McGeorge Bundy singled out as the single most important (and by the US unexpected) characteristic of the Vietnam War: the endurance and persistence of the enemy, even in the face of extraordinary losses sustained over long periods of time -- longer timespans than the American people could stomach. Even if nothing else in the analogy holds up (and I wouldn't go that far) the main reason the US lost the Vietnam War looks like the main reason the US is likely to lose out in Afghanistan.

Tom Engelhardt points out in his introduction that Washington these days is torn between two Vietnam books: Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, and Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. I've read the former. You can read all you need to know on my book page. I haven't bothered with Sorley. I don't find his book credible, for a couple of reasons. One is that throughout the whole history of the war there were always metrics to show that the US was winning. It eventually became a commonplace that the US won every battle and still lost the war. So intuitively I don't believe Sorley's victories. That doesn't mean they're not worth examining, but I'd be real surprised if examination doesn't reveal that they are illusions or irrelevancies. Another reason is that the US had already lost the war in 1964-65. Before the US had hopes of propping up a friendly Vietnamese regime against a Vietnamese insurgency, but the desperate coup against Diem and insertion of US soldiers discredited the Saigon government and turned the war into a colonialist venture. No power since WWII had pulled that off, and Vietnam was too large, militant, resilient, and patient to allow an exception. So even if Sorley could point to tactical victories, turning that into anything more than an extension of an already shamefully extended war would be very hard to believe. One more point is that I believe that a US military victory -- whatever that means -- would have been a bad thing, certainly for the US and most likely for Vietnam. A "victory" in Vietnam would have bolstered the militarist right, leading to more wars -- much like the evident victory in Afghanistan in 2001 led to the Iraq invasion in 2003. Or like the US victory in WWII put us on a path of 60+ years of more/less constant war, where defeated powers like Germany and Japan have managed to mind their own business.

In 1965 McGeorge Bundy was looking at analyses showing that the US could never win anything in Vietnam and urging Johnson to Americanize the war -- to send massive ground troops and to launch enormous waves of bombing -- for no reason other than to save face by postponing the inevitable. Thirty years later he, like Robert McNamara, realized that his advice was disastrous, but he was trapped inside a bubble where everyone thought the world would end if even one domino flipped communist. Astore contrasts the simultaneous views of others not inside the imperial bubble -- specifically Norman Mailer. One striking point Astore makes, citing Mailer:

Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America."

Of course, with television there are Americans who can picture Afghan faces, but they are few and far between. Some sympathize with Afghanistan, a sentiment hawks readily prey upon, although you'll be hard pressed to find those same hawks actually caring about America much less Afghanistan. The real reason they insist on fighting in Afghanistan is that they like to fight. They worry if the US ducks out of a fight even in a place that otherwise matters not one whit to the people who run the country, much less the people who merely work here. If you look back to hawks like Bundy you find the same indifference and disregard of Vietnamese people our modern hawks have for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the you find the same callow reasons for slogging on.

Matthew Yglesias: The Goldberg Standard: Might as well quote this short post in toto:

To some, the modern American right-wing looks intellectually moribund. Steve Hayward thinks there's some truth to that, but also powerful minds working on serious issues; people like . . . Jonah Goldberg. The idea that Goldberg's Liberal Fascism represents one of the peaks of right-of-center political thinking is, I think, a more damning indictment than anything any liberal could possibly come up with.

Goldberg is so inscrutable I've never even managed to parse the title. In English we normally put the adjective in front of the noun, which should make the book about a subset of Fascism, specifically the Liberal subset. In other words, it reads like an oxymoron, but whereas you can find relatively jumbo shrimp, which fascists were relatively liberal? Franco? Juan Peron? Neither seems to be a subject of interest to Goldberg. Nor is it clear that he means Fascist Liberalism, although that seems to get closer to his intent. But rather than focusing on a subset of liberalism, he wants to taint the whole by finding a phylogenetic linkage from fascism to liberalism -- something remarkable (in the sense of ridiculous) not only logically but historically. Or maybe not: could he be complaining that fascism is debilitated by its ontological linkage to liberalism?

Given the confusion in the title -- not helped by the subtitle, The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, implying (among other things) that Il Duce was an American and that "the politics of meaning" actually means something -- it seems unlikely that reading the book would clarify anything. Still, the book was a huge bestseller, paving the way for subsequent nonsense by Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, and Michelle Malkin. Still, the main effect seems to have been to free the word "fascist" of all meaning for use as an all-purpose epithet. Maybe it was wrong to characterize George Bush (just to pick a not-quite-arbitrary example) as a fascist, but at least one could make a logical argument, citing points both for and against. But after Goldberg, the right is free to attack Obama as fascist or nazi or socialist or liberal or any other nasty itch they wish to scratch.

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PS: From the publisher's notes:

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities -- where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. [ . . . ]

We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

No need to refute these arguments point-by-point. Like antimatter, few even survive as arguable assertions as far as the period. To take an example, one reason no one (but Goldberg) remembers Du Bois as having been "inspired by Hitler's Germany" was that the people we do remember so inspired where conservative racists and antisemites, not civil rights leaders. Another reason is that Du Bois is more often remembered as a communist, forgetting that before WWII hardly any white people but communists really supported civil rights. FDR certainly didn't want to talk about it -- Ira Katznelson wrote a book about the New/Fair Deals called When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Injustice in Twentieth-Century America. (Goldberg's own magazine, National Review was still defending segregation in the 1960s.)

In my recent books post, I noted several new paperback editions of books that I had read over the last year, but hadn't managed to get my quotes/notes pages together on. I've hustled a bit and finally gotten that done:

• Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner).
• Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2008; paperback, 2009, Holt).
• James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008; paperback, 2009, Free Press).
• Paul Krugman: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008; paperback, 2009, WW Norton).

I didn't manage to add a lot of analysis or critique to these notes. I've never been much for liberalism, which is one reason I so appreciate Ali, but Frank, Galbraith, and Krugman make a pretty solid case for it, and not just given the recent alternative.

Ahmed Rashid: The Afghanistan Impasse. I just read two books on Afghanistan, and was pleased to see this, nominally a review of two more books that I had only dimly been aware of and conveniently found in the library. Turns out it has little to do with Nicholas Schmidle's To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (Henry Holt) and Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's). I'll thumb through those books later and let you know what I find. Rashid is the venerable Pakistani journalist whose Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia is the standard source on the rise of the Taliban, and whose 2008 book, Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia is the best available book on what happened to the region since the US got took an interest in late 2001. (See my book page for extensive quotes.) He is, in short, both a guy who knows what he's talking about. However, he seems to have gotten too wound up in his subject, which is turning him from a fine journalist to a muddled pundit. Consider the following two paragraphs:

After Obama's injection of 21,000 troops and trainers, total Western forces in Afghanistan now number 100,000, including 68,000 US troops. It is likely that General McChrystal will soon ask for more. Obama's overall plan has been to achieve security by doubling the Afghan army's strength to 240,000 men and the police to 160,000; but these are tasks that would take at least until 2014 to complete, if indeed they can be carried out. Meanwhile the military operation in Afghanistan is now costing cash-strapped US taxpayers $4 billion a month.

Across the region many people fear that the US and NATO may start to pull out of Afghanistan during the next twelve months despite their uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban walking into Kabul. Al-Qaeda would be in a stronger position to launch global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to "liberate" large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the security situation has deteriorated progressively ever since winter 2001/2002 -- the time period when Rory Stewart was able to walk across much of the country (see The Places in Between [book page]. This has happened in almost perfect correlation with the increase of US and NATO troops, the "training" of "Afghan forces," and the spending (or wasting) of vast sums of development money. The two may not be causally linked, but it's clear that involvement of the sort that the US has engaged in for eight years now has had little benefit either to Afghanistan or to the US and now seems to be returning less and less value. I'm convinced that the problem is endemic both to Afghanistan and to the US, and that the combination simply doesn't work. As polls indicate, a majority of Americans (and a supermajority of Democrats) have come to the same conclusion, even if they're unlikely to phrase it my way. (Most are less tempted to blame the Americans than the Afghans.) We're a nation that prides itself on good business sense, and quite frankly any business that reviews returns like these will quickly move to cut their losses. There may be some room for debating how to do that, but it should be clear that our best efforts have failed and that some sort of reduction is clearly in order.

Rashid, however, has bought into the occupation to such an extent that his second paragraph is full of doom alarms meant to cower us. Although the Taliban can do damage in Afghanistan, there is no reason to think they could take over Kabul without significant foreign support, which is very unlikely. Similar predictions were made when the Soviets withdrew, but the rump government held its positions against US- and Pakistani-funded mujahideen for three years, until the Soviet Union collapsed and ended all aid. The notion that Pakistan would fall to the Taliban is even more far fetched. Pakistan may tolerate the Taliban in the small and marginal (to it) FATA, but Pakistan's military easily routed the Taliban in the Swat Valley. No one thinks the Taliban has any prospects beyond the Pashtun belt, which as Pakistan goes is thin and marginal.

One thing that's happened in the last year is that the honeymoon between Pakistan and the Taliban is finally over. It's hard to see either side putting that relationship back together again. Pakistan has a problem with India, but the solution there is diplomatic. That is something the US can and should work on. Afghanistan has a lot of problems, and no easy solutions. Most of all they need to develop a viable state and a viable economy. I doubt that either has ever happened under foreign occupation. They certainly haven't happened while there was a major insurrection against foreign occupation. The US and NATO need to reduce their footprint and chokehold considerably, preferably completely. Aid needs to be managed better -- now it's mostly soaked up in graft, doing virtually no one any good. There are plenty of smarter ways to do this, but the one thing we know will be disastrous would be to keep pumping troops in until we grind the Afghans into submission. We don't have the troops, time, or money, and the human toll on the ground would be devastating.

Rashid's threats turn out to be the same threats that Gen. McChrystal made in his leaked report about what would happen if he didn't get his extra 40,000 troops. Such threats play on the ignorance of politicians, who can easily imagine them being turned into told-you-so's if they don't cover their ass and go along. In other words, they're bully bluffs. The real question to ask McChrystal is what difference 40,000 troops would make. The obvious answer is that they'll provide the Taliban with more targets, so more American troops will get killed and maimed; and they'll kill a few more Taliban and a lot more ordinary Afghans, as well as turn more of the latter into Taliban. In other words, they will perpetuate the violence, which is really the last thing we should want.

Rashid writes a bit about the elections. One thing I have to say about this is that it would have been good for Karzai to have lost -- not because he's corrupt or inept or whatever, but because it would have shown Afghans that it is possible to change leaders without using bullets. That would have been a good lesson to learn. It would even give the Taliban reason to run for office rather than try to shoot their way in.

Tom Engelhardt: Measuring Success in Afghanistan. Checking the numbers, plus a thought on why "their Afghans" are so effective fighting and "our Afghans" aren't:

Here's something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers, your election advisors, your private security guards, your military trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your bidding.

The way to level the field between "our Afghans" and "their Afghans" is to bring the US troops home. Then all each will have to fight for is their own freedom from control by other Afghans -- where the Taliban have a pretty nasty track record, as do the warlords in different ways. They can pick their poison, or compromise. But now the choice is between fighting for or against us, which isn't a choice that favors us.

Tom Engelhardt: How to Trap a President in a Losing War: On the McChrystal memo. Sees Petraeus behind it, "the most political general to come down the pike since, in 1951 in the midst of the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said his goodbyes to Congress after being cashiered by President Truman for insubordination -- for, in effect, wanting to run his own war and the foreign policy that went with it." Also makes frequent reference to "the Surgettes": the pundits who, having got lucky in Iraq, now see surges as the answers to each and every military failure. The Surge worked in Iraq because it was preceded by a series of deals that were the real cause for the reduction in violence. (By the way, the drop was masked for nearly a by the additional violence the extra troops brought with them. The reduction only became evident when the troops were throttled to keep the whole strategem from failing.) For lots of reasons the same strategy cannot work in Afghanistan.

Helene Cooper: GOP Support May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War. A good reason to think about whether he really wants to fight to keep the Afghan war going. One big reason why Clinton lost his health care reform program in 1993-94 was that he pushed NAFTA out ahead of it. He passed NAFTA, but only with Republican support, while crippling the union efforts he needed for health care. Why didn't he make NAFTA contingent on getting health care passed? Why not make Afghanistan contingent on health care reform now? It's not like the Republicans are cutting him any slack for being out front with in their war -- and really, all wars benefit the Republicans because they burn tax money and distract from reform at home. Not that the political calculus is what you want to base your Afghanistan policy on. But it's safe to say the Republicans do just that, and if they see a way to burn Obama they'll do it.

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I read two books on Afghanistan last week, collecting extensive notes on them.

Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble covers the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, with a bit on the Najibullah regime that remained in power until 1992. It's drawn mostly from the personal stories of Soviet soldiers, with a fairly brief summary of the high-level politics in the Kremlin. The decision to "invade" seems to have been made almost accidentally, like the Politburo was trying to follow procedures for 1956 Hungary and 1967 Czechoslovakia but couldn't remember the details and were too embarrassed to look them up or test whether they were relevant to Afghanistan. They weren't. The Soviets had installed communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and owned them lock, stock and barrel. Moreover, they were lined up behind an Iron Curtain where NATO threatened the Soviet Union on one side, but where the Soviet Union was free to act on the other. The communist government in Afghanistan was the result of a local coup -- and was riven by factions (Khalq and Parcham) actively involved in killing each other off. The Kabul government had very little control over the countryside -- in fact, less and less every day. The only thing the Soviets actually decided was to dive in and kill off the Parcham leader, Hafizullah Amin (who had recently killed off the Khalq leader, Mohammed Taraki). The troops were sent in to back up the assassination, having already failed once so ineptly that Amin was unawares. Soviet invasion instantly undermined the Kabul government, rather than fortifying it, leaving the invaders with an utter mess. From there on, well, you know the drill: stay the course, we can't afford to lose, giving up would invite disaster, blah blah blah. The Soviet Union had declined miserably by the 1980s, such that the soldiers were ill-equipped and ill-supported. They provisioned themselves by looting, and defended themselves by indiscriminate slaughter. The US, China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia poured billions of dollars in weapons to prop up mujahideen warlords, who barely made a dent against the Soviet war machine, but did incredible damage to Afghanistan. The Soviet Union lost fewer than 15,000 soldiers in the war (although the injuries and trauma were far greater). More than a million Afghans died, and seven million were displaced. In other words, the Americans (primarily the Reagan administration) cheerfully sacrificed 70 Afghans for every Soviet they killed. They utterly destroyed the Afghan state and economy, and they prevented a whole generation of Afghans from learning and developing normal skills, while training a generation of murderers and thieves. The result was civil war that continues to this day, exemplified by the Taliban rule in the late 1990s, one of the most barbarous and incompetent regimes since WWII. Nor were the scars restricted to Afghanistan. Returning Soviet soldiers turned into violent criminals, which practically became the norm in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mujahideen warlords Reagan praised as like our founding fathers took jihad on the road, leading to scores of terrorist atrocities from Bali to the World Trade Center in New York. And after 2001, the Americans returned to wreak even more havoc in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, becoming not only the world's superpower but its most dangerous rogue nation.

For more on Feifer's book, see the book page.

Jones is a RAND Corp. political scientist, based in Washington DC. His resume includes visiting Afghanistan "over a dozen times since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." His book promises to be the first comprehensive history of the first 7 years of the US occupation of Afghanistan. It's fairly spotty in that regard: neither a military history nor a political history; despite a few first-person stories, not what you'd call journalism either. He throws in a few pages on Alexander and Tamerlane and Babur and Rudyard Kipling, but he doesn't offer much depth. He does offer some sociological concepts, and sketches out a comparative set of insurgency studies. And he winds up with a few prescriptions that never once call into question the premises of the problem. In a nutshell, this is what passes for analytical thinking in DC these days. Lord help us.

For more on Jones' book, see the book page.

At the end of Jones' book, he makes a set of recommendations for turning the war around. He argues that at least some Americans have always understood Afghanistan (ambassadors Zalmay Khalilzad and Ronald Neumann are his examples) and that the problems were caused by political leaders who didn't listen to good advise (no names, but I know a Bush when I smell one). Then he blames the insurgency on "too little outside support for the Afghan government and too much support for insurgents." That led me to comment:

There's no evidence, in this book at least, that either Khalilzad's adolescence of Neumann's sheep hunting adventure in any way offered any profound insights into the problems poised by Afghanistan. They, at best, were slightly less ignorant and slightly less indifferent than the usual run of Americans driven by the Global War on Terror into Afghanistan. The fact is that Afghanistan was never more than an accident in the minds of American politicians and warriors who had their minds on something else: on humiliating the Russians back in 1979 and on reasserting US global dominance in 2001. The original sin was back in 1979 when Carter and Brzezinski put the whole Afghan people at risk to further their puerile Cold War fantasies. Pause a moment on that: if Jimmy Carter cared so little about what would happen to Afghanistan, what hope can you invest in the brains and moral character of Reagan, Clinton, and two generations of Bush?

It's easy to argue that an insurgency arose in Afghanistan because the post-2001 state was weak, but when has Afghanistan ever had an effective system of government? Certainly not under Zahir Shah, when Afghanistan was still at peace. Most likely never. The Soviets can be blamed for meddling if not in the 1978 Revolution, which seems to have been a bit of mischief endemic to the weak government's elite institutions, then in trying to sort out the Khalq-Parcham factional strife of the pro-communist ruling party. But it was first Pakistan then the US that tore Afghanistan apart with their "better dead than red" obsession. The Soviets' real crime was blundering into the trap the US had set. They did this because they didn't understand a couple of very basic things: first was that neither communist faction had any popular support; second was that whoever controls the state in Afghanistan controls nothing of effective value; third is that the only thing that really gets Afghans riled up is the presence of a foreign army on their soil. From 1979 on, Afghanistan has been riven by civil war, which has largely been sponsored by foreign interests, each concerned with the other, none caring the least bit about what happens to the Afghans.

The only important thing that changed between 1979 and 2001 was that during the intervening 22 years (now 30 years) the only skill worth an Afghan's effort to develop was fighting war. The result is that the political class in Afghanistan has been rigorously selected for the sole trait of self-interested preservation in times of war. Back in 1979 Afghanistan had virtually no skills for state-building. Two decades later the state was run by the Taliban, probably the most incompetent bureaucrats of the last century. (I suppose you could argue that the Belgian legacy in the Congo that led to Mobuto was in the running, but I doubt that it comes close. Aside from the Taliban's warped-but-real system of justice, every other normal function of government, to the extent that it was implemented at all, was left to the charity of foreign NGOs.) So along comes Bush and Rumsfeld, who really don't have the slightest clue why America functions better than other oligarchies like Haiti, and they're dumbfounded to find themselves in a country where nobody knows how to do anything, except fight. That's pretty hopeless under any circumstances, but what makes it even worse is that all Bush and Rumsfeld ever wanted in the first place was to fight -- fighting is why the US invaded in the first place.

So when the author complains about the government getting too little support and the insurgency getting too much support he's trying to balance totally different things on the same scale. The fact is that the insurgency got peanuts compared to what was spent on the government and the war effort. I mean, who paid for the Taliban? A few tribal leaders in the poorest part of Pakistan, some mid-level ISI operatives, the mythical financiers of the Gulf sheikdoms, some drug runners. They must have been outspent a thousand-to-one, but in Afghanistan you can buy a lot of killing awful cheap, and you can hardly buy honest government at all -- especially when you're laundering so much of the money back to outfits like DynCorp, which is, after all, the Bush way.

So to say the debacle wasn't inevitable is to buy into a lot of wishful thinking that has no business in Afghanistan.

He then proposed to fix this by building up a non-corrupt government, working more with local institutions than with national ones, and persuading Pakistan to shut down the safe havens the Taliban are using in Pakistani territory. For comments on those, follow the link above.