Thomas Barnett predicts that, “Iran will experience an overthrow of the mullahs’ rule by 2010.”

A slightly bold prediction, you say, but not exactly a hard one to make given ongoing events?   Does he get extra points for having written the above in the summer of 2003 and publishing it on page 380 of Pentagon’s New Map?

Considering I’d be leery of making that prediction even considering ongoing events, I’d say so.

Mark Safranski has a mini-review up of Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers.

Not having read the book, I don’t have anything substantive to add.  I had previously mentally noted that Horse Soldiers was also the name of a classic John Wayne movie but figured it was a coincidence — until I saw the bottom blurb that he had previous written a book called In Harm’s Way which, of course, is also the name of a classic John Wayne movie.

Any guesses as to the next book?  Marry up a John Wayne movie title with a one-sentence subtitle in Stanton’s genre to play along.  The Green Berets is hereby ruled ineligible on account of being too obvious.

NPR has an amusing bit on “Morning Edition” by Rob Gifford on Bloomsday, the annual festival wherein “Thousands of people descend on Dublin each June 16th to celebrate Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses by recreating the events in the book. The novel chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin on a single day — June 16, 1904 — a day, as Bloom says, that’s a ‘chapter of accidents.’”

The upshot is that the language and structure of the book is so inaccessible to modern English readers that most of the celebrants admit to never having read the book or to having tried but given up.  

Ulysses, it seems, is a book people want to have read.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and any excuse to travel to Dublin for a day of merrymaking is likely as good as any.  But it’s an amusing concept, nonetheless.

What other books fall into this category?

In “Born Yesterday,” Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was famously revealed to be such a book.  The Bible, perhaps?

The most compelling book review I’ve read in ages:

Do you love Italy? Do you love booze? Do you love life? Do you feel you deserve a second chance? If you could credibly answer yes to a couple of those questions then you should buy this book. And if you can’t say yes then this is the only novel you have to buy this year.

Now, this is Alex Massie writing about Surviving, dad Allan Massie’s latest effort and some might say he’s a wee bit biased.  But, c’mon, them’s some compelling topics.

Photo by Flickr user Aubrey Arenas under Creative Commons license.

Bill Dyer reviews Banquos’s Ghosts, the first novel by Rich Lowry and Keith Korman, and finds it weak on writing and strong on moral clarity.  Having read so many spy novels with the opposite mix, he’s anxiously awaiting the sequel in hopes they get a better editor.

It’s been some time since I’ve found the time and energy for reading fiction, so most of my recent encounters with the spy genre have been on film.  I must say that I’ve gotten quite tired of the CIA as bad guy and the villain-as-sympathetic-character tropes.  Both were novel plot twists a quarter century ago and made for more three-dimensional characters.  Now, though, they’ve become formulaic and, given we’re in the midst of two wars, a bit demoralizing.  I’m not sure we need to go back to the entertaining but propagandistic films of John Wayne’s heyday but a couple steps back in that direction would be welcome.

Not, I hasten to add, at the cost of good writing.

Apparently, there’s this new book out by this guy named Thoreau who advocates a hermetic existence out in the woods.  Timothy Sandefur reviews it and finds it to be “a merciless collection of false profundity and Puritanism.”

Over the last four days, I’ve given you a thematic look at Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, the next book by Pentagon’s New Map author Thomas Barnett, that goes on sale February 5th.  Because of the meatiness of the material, I mostly stuck to summary, trying to synthesize some far-ranging ideas into easily digestible bites.

In today’s conclusion, Great Powers – Reflections, I offer a more analytic take.  An excerpt

First off, it’s an incredibly ambitious project.  In 408 pages (at least in the uncorrected pre-publication proof), Barnett provides a soup-to-nuts retrospective and prescriptive look at the entire geopolitical universe.  He covers early American history, the good and bad of the Bush administration, and a strategic and economic look at every region of the world.

While I read with my political scientist hat on, I don’t think there’s much I could have cut if I’d had my editor’s hat on.  I may have gotten it down to 350 pages by consolidation of themes but that may well have come at the cost of necessary repetition of ideas across thematic areas that, as good teachers like Barnett know, is necessary for students to finally “get” an idea.

Aside from perhaps Thomas Friedman, there’s not a more optimistic thinker who’s worth reading.  While by no means a Pollyanna, Barnett sees the world as in much better shape than most of his counterparts in the national security policy community and sees it becoming progressively better.   The things that keep most strategists and economists up at night are mere bumps in the road that, if properly managed, will lead to a more peaceful, prosperous planet.

While I’ve got plenty of quibbles along the way, being possessed of a more skeptical nature, Barnett’s fundamentally right on the big things.   While it no doubt causes much pain and displacement in the short term, globalization is both inevitable and fantastically good in the long term.  Further, Russia, China, Iran, and other regional powers don’t have to be our enemies.

In 5 Questions for Thomas Barnett, I conduct a short interview with the author.  His answers are more thorough than I’d expected and defy excerpting. Read it for yourselves and comment to your heart’s content.

Under the header “First Lady Gets Small Book Advance” Political Wire informs me that, “According to the New York Post, First Lady Laura Bush received an advance of just $1.6 million for her book deal announced yesterday — far less than the $8 million Hillary Clinton received for her memoir, Living History.”

First, as someone who writes for a living, I weep at these ridiculously outsized advances for celebrity books of little content.

Second, the Bush-Clinton comparison is a little silly.  Hillary Clinton was not only running for the Senate but the publisher reasonably hoped she’d dish on the Monica Lewinski scandal.   Nobody expects anything particularly juicy to come from Laura Bush’s account of her time in the White House.

Andrew Exum (aka “abu muqawama”) offers a rather blistering review of Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq.

This, too, is hagiography. (”It reads as if ghost-written by Petraeus,” one friend complained.) That wasn’t my complaint, though. Maybe Petraeus, like Mandela, is a man worth all the superlatives. But every U.S. officer in Robinson’s narrative is shown in only the most positive light. Officers are invariably “tough” and “resourceful” and “bright” and “hard-working” and “intelligent.” (”Surely there are a few s***bags left in the Army,” I found myself asking halfway through.) So like one narrative of the Iraq War — in which U.S. efforts went from “awesome” (in 2003) to “awesomer” (in 2005) to “awesomest” (in 2007) — officers are only varying shades of ass-kicking in Robinson’s account.

There’s a bit of that in Robert Kaplan’s books, too, although I find his analysis nonetheless interesting.

Matthew Yglesias published Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats way back in April but some of the reviews are just now hitting the ‘net.

Jim Henley’s is in Reason and entitled, “Between Iraq and a Soft Place – Democrats counter with a kinder, gentler interventionism.”  My own, which hit the print edition of The New Individualist weeks ago, is now available online under the title “Politics at the Water’s Edge.”

Interestingly, our takes are quite similar:  The book is provocative, well-written, and does a good job synthesizing recent political history but fails at its prescriptive goals by glossing over the shared flaws of the neoconservatism he hates and the liberal interventionism he champions.

Both reviews — and the book itelf — are worth a look.

Last week, I wrote about some weird emails I received inviting me to attend an event at the National Press Club unveiling a new book that would Swift Boat a major candidate. As promised, I skipped it but kept alert for the details.

Mary Ann Akers, who writes “The Sleuth” blog for WaPo, attended, along with “about a dozen reporters and four photographers who clearly had nothing better to do.”

A lapsed Mormon, Michael Moody mocked his former religion (in very nasty terms) and declared Romney unfit for the presidency because of what he sees as the Mormon former Massachusetts governor’s biggest conflict: his “blood oath” to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

And then came the “C” word: “The great American cult,” Moody said, characterizing the religion founded by Joseph Smith, a prophet to Mormons.

[...]

Instead, Moody spoke in more dumbed-down terms of how Mormons are beholden to living prophets, such as Gordon Hinckley, who can tip them off to the Second Coming. “The Mormon prophet — he is the man,” Moody said, adding that “they” — the Mormons — are “waiting for Hinckley to tell ‘em: ‘Let’s go to Missouri and knock it off with an Osmond concert and build the new Jerusalem.”

I also got a fourth breathless update from Daryl Toor, the press agent for Revelation Press. The intro:

In 2004, John Kerry faced opposition from an unexpected quarter – his fellow Swift Boat veterans from Vietnam. In 2008, it’s Mitt Romney’s turn to be “Swift-Boated” – but this time, instead of unsubstantiated innuendo, Romney is “Swift Boated” with a comprehensively-researched, solidly fact-based book – Mitt, Set Our People Free! Like Toto in Oz, this book tears away the curtain and reveals the truth behind the Mormon Church and its beliefs about the U.S. Presidency – and what that will mean to “President” Mitt Romney.

This exciting new book – Mitt, Set Our People Free! – published by Revelation Press, reveals just how Mitt Romney’s sacred oath to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known as the Mormons or the LDS – including a vow of obedience to the “Living Prophet,” the President of the LDS Church – will impact his ability to govern as President of the United States.

Jesus said that man cannot serve two masters – but if Romney is elected President, he will have to serve two conflicting oaths. American Presidents swear an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. However, this Presidential Oath is in direct conflict with Romney’s sacred oath to his Mormon Church – a blood oath which puts Romney’s life, fortune and obedience at the unrestricted service of his Church. This obedience is defined by the Church’s Living Prophet, the President of the Mormon Church and – as they believe – the literal Voice of God on earth.

(The email had weird machine language characters where the em dashes appear above but it cut and pastes fine. Likely a Mormon plot directed by the angel Maroni.)

These people are clearly buffoons. They continue to direct me to a website, http://www.revelationpress.com/, that does not exist. Their press release says the book is available at Amazon but they don’t provide a direct link. Nor does a search for the author or title reveal any results. Perhaps Hinckley and his evil minions are behind these plots?

I’m glad I decided not to walk the four blocks from my office over to the National Press Building for this one. Methinks I’ll pass on the book as well.

Ironically, however, I’m still not voting for Romney.

I’ve written a review of The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda, a riveting retelling of the events of November, 1979, when a group of around 500 Islamic extremists (including at least two American Black Muslims) seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. The author concludes that this action, taken along with other events of that momentous month, led to the Islamic extremism we’re experiencing today. He notes how the Saudi Ulema, in return for their continued support of the state, extorted a high price: the rolling back of many of the modest reforms and modernizations the government had achieved.

I think the book misses the target on some analysis, particularly in drawing conclusions from contested ‘facts’, and he simply gets some of the history wrong. But the book is very much on target when it comes to the siege in Mecca and the way it was resolved. It also goes into the role of French commandos, the utter failure of Jimmy Carter’s White House, and the way rumor could spread internationally, even in pre-Internet days. Definitely worth reading.

You can read my full review here.

Matt Labash gives a strong review of A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically:

It’s better than the Bible. Or not better, necessarily. But it is funnier, moves faster, and doesn’t bog you down with any of those genealogies.

I’ll wager that it won’t sell as many copies, however.

via Jonathan Last

I wanted to have this posted in a more timely fashion but, between starting a new job and a hard drive crash that kept me offline for over a week, it ended up on the backburner. Nevertheless, for that as might be interested, here’s my review of the final Harry Potter book.

I won’t go as far as Sophie Masson and say that Harry Potter is the best fantasy series ever. But it is delightful, engaging, and compelling. Yes, they’re intended as juveniles but, in the tradition of the best such works (Narnia and Earthsea being the most obviously relevant examples), are eminently enjoyable by adults, as well. One finds oneself increasing attached to the characters and concerned for their fates. The end of the series is accordingly leavened by the bittersweet realization that one won’t get any further opportunities to spend time with these wonderful people.

Perhaps most importantly, now that it’s all said and done, the moral lesson of the series is neither trite nor obvious but, rather, important and thoroughly developed.

*** SPOILERS BELOW – READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK ***

Turning to this last point first, note that it is especially significant because the first indications of the lesson being taught appeared in the early books suggested that we were in for just one more in an endless series of “Love conquers all” morality plays. That’s certainly the core of it but, as with other aspects of her tale, Rowling’s real point is considerably more nuanced.

The lessons we teach our children (and this series has certainly taught a lot of them) are of vital importance. The idea that “popular” works can also serve this function is often discounted, but the lessons embedded in such works are arguably among the most important, since they reach so many. Trust, loyalty, bravery, honesty, humility, courage in one’s convictions… these are the lessons that Harry Potter teaches. Love does indeed conquer all, but it doesn’t do so painlessly. On the contrary, love often demands very heavy sacrifices indeed. In the end, however, they tend to be worth the cost.

The parallels between himself and Voldemort, first seen upon Harry’s visit to Olivander’s in Chapter 5 of Sorcerer’s Stone, emphasize how easy it would have been for Harry to go the same way as the Dark Lord. As we discover how he gained some of his powers and the various ways he and the Dark Lord are alike, the crucial distinction between them grows ever more important. Fate shapes us, but it’s what we do with what fate gives us that makes us who we are. Harry is frequently reminded of his similarities to Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort, but his capacity to give and receive love (which Voldemort utterly fails to comprehend, making him evil) and the choices he makes as a result are what make him good.

This is underscored all the more forcefully when we learn what Snape’s really been up to all this time and why. As is her wont, Rowling leaves Snape’s true allegiance ambiguous as long as possible. But when we do finally learn his backstory — which turns out to be a rather more robust and interesting tale than I think most of us truly expected — Snape’s redemption arises from the same source: His capacity to love. Snape is a genuinely flawed (his pride caused him to ruin whatever relationship he might ever have had with Lily, for instance) but, while his beliefs led him to follow Voldemort, his love for Lily redeems him, leading him down the most dangerous and difficult path of any character in the series. Yet he does it and seems genuinely shocked when he discovers, or so he thinks, that it’s never been to “save” Harry at all.

Which leads us to Dumbledore. Even after his death Dumbledore guides those who “serve” him, often by outright manipulation. But, we discover, he really does know what he’s doing. Dumbledore’s final manipulation, via Snape’s memories, is intended to ensure that Harry is saved. We share Snape’s anger at Dumbledore’s intentions until we discover the real reason behind it, something we’ve been well prepared to do by the way Rowling leads us to that particular circumstance. In the end, however, the trust Dumbledore places on both Harry and Snape — and they in him — is as prescient as his gift to Ron.*

In the end, pretty much all the open questions are answered, most of them satisfyingly. Some people don’t make it to the end, which was to be expected. Rowling’s never shied away from killing characters when the plot demands it. Here, all of his substitute parents dead, Harry ends the story standing fully on his own two feet.

Other characters come into their own, as well, Neville Longbottom, most especially. That he took the lead among the students in Harry’s absence and was able to prove himself a “true Gryffindor” in the climax were especially rewarding. Ron and Hermione play a more central role in the resolution of the plot than they’ve been allowed to for some time, moving up somewhat from the more supportive roles they’ve fulfilled the last few books to actively participate in destroying Voldemort’s horcruxes (letting each of them, plus Neville, destroy one was a nice touch that underscored the fact that, without the help and support of his friends since Year One, Harry would never have made it this far).

There have been a lot of questions raised about just how much of the series Rowling really had planned out from the start. Well, I’ve reread a couple of the earlier books since finishing this one and I have to conclude that she wasn’t just winging it: The groundwork for almost every single major element of the climax of Deathly Hallows is laid in the closing chapters of Chamber of Secrets. She took us on a long, emotional — and very entertaining — journey to fill in the details on the way from from there to here. And taught some valuable lessons along the way.

—
* I note, however, that there’s a rather large plot whole in the Dumboledore-Snape-Harry dynamic: The only way that Snape could transmit the information Dumbledore needs Harry to get from him that would lead Harry to actually believe that information is the way it happened. But not even Dumbledore is prescient enough to know that Harry would just happen to be ready to hand under his Invisibility Cloak when Voldemort attacks Snape or that Voldement would just happen to walk away leaving a mortally wounded Snape just enough time for Harry to get the memories from him. It works very well as plotted, true. And Snape is clearly trying to follow Dumbledore’s instructions in asking to be allowed to go find Harry right before Voldemort sets Nagini on him. But we’re never told how Snape was supposed to overcome Harry’s immense distrust if events had turned out any other way.

Another plot problem arises with Harry’s plan to end the extraordinary power of the Elder Wand. Dumbledore apparently became the Wand’s master by defeating its previous possessor, Grindelwald, in a duel. But Grindelwald can’t have been the Wand’s master: He stole it, rather than defeating its master (plus, he should’ve been unbeatable with it). So, unless the Wand chose Grindelwald as its master anyway and Grindelwald fought Dumbledore with some lesser wand for some reason (which is hard to believe), the Wand has at least once chosen a new master after passing out of the hands of an old one without that master being defeated. It can do so again, making Harry’s plan unlikely to work.

Sophie Masson argues that J.K. Rowling is a “genius” and that her Harry Potter series surpasses the work of the “great fantasy authors, such as [C.S.] Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman.”

All of these books share the great themes of good and evil and the quest for wisdom and love. Their authors also share a strong background in classical literature, myth and fairytale. They are all great storytellers. Rowling shares with Tolkien a glorious gift for what the old ringmaster called “the art of subcreation, the power to give fantasy the inner consistency of reality” and also a good eye for a satisfying ending, but thank heavens she doesn’t share with him a taste for tedious genealogies, over-solemnity or ghastly dwarf songs.

She shares with Lewis a spring-like freshness, sense of fun, broad satire and a marvellous inventiveness but, unlike him, she finished her series well: the final book in the Narnia series, The Last Battle, was a bitter disappointment to me as a child as it’s far too polemical and theme-driven. This is also true of Pullman’s much-admired His Dark Materials, which begins magnificently with Northern Lights, starts to falter in The Subtle Knife and falls in a heap in The Amber Spyglass which, mirroring the final book in the series of his bete noire, Lewis, fails to trust its characters and story and descends into preaching (of the opposite viewpoint). With Pullman, however, Rowling shares a happy talent for names, and terrific pace and timing.

As to the quality of her prose, I reckon Rowling pretty much matches Lewis: engaging, bright and child-oriented, with a great clarity and playfulness of expression, mixed with some clunky bits and some cliched moments. (Pullman and Tolkien are perhaps more consistent, more adult-oriented prose stylists, though they too have their flaws.) Her characters are archetypal but so are all the others’: fantasy thrives on the archetypes which live deep in all of us.

I know Potter only through the movies and critiques, not yet having read the books. I’m not familiar with Pullman’s work and it’s been too long (perhaps 30 years) since I read the Chronicles of Narnia series for me to have more than general impressions. I must agree with Masson on Tolkien, though: As magical as his stories were, he could have used a good editor.

via Norman Geras