A Power Line Christmas
I thought I would note the books by friends or readers of Power Line that we have written about over the past year. These excellent books would make fine Christmas of Hanukkah gifts for family and friends.
Noemie Emery, Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families. Kathryn Lopez interviewed Noemie about the book here. Noemie examines the political variation of what Freud called "the family romance" among the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Gores and the Bushes. This short book is full of entertaining political history of a high order, distilled by reflection and understanding.
Bill Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope. Bill Bennett is obviously not a historian; he is a public intellectual, a man of politics and public affairs. Yet he is an avid reader, a gifted teacher, and an advocate of America’s cause. All these qualities are on display in his overview of American history from Columbus to the eve of World War I. Bill bases his narrative on the best secondary sources and spins them into a compelling story. He writes in the spirit of a "loving critic." This is a book by a voracious reader who loves our country and wants all of us to know why we should too.
Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History: 1500 to Today. I asked Max if he would write briefly about the book for our readers, and he kindly responded:
I wrote War Made New to provide historical perspective on the challenges we face in coping with warfare in the Information Age. Ever since America’s victory in the 1991 Gulf War—a victory made possible by stealth aircraft, smart bombs, GPS locators, and other advanced technologies—there has been a lot of heated debate over how and whether the U.S. military should transform itself to meet future threats. I don’t have any easy answers, but I do try to introduce ordinary readers to this important discussion by looking at how previous Great Powers have coped with epochal changes—the Gunpowder Revolution (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1850-1914), the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and now the Information Revolution (1970 to the present). To make this debate more vivid and less theoretical, I build my narrative around a series of battles, starting with the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and concluding with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which illustrate the changing nature of warfare.The subject of military transformation is one that is difficult to make interesting -- some think it impossible -- but the book is not just interesting, it is compelling.My major conclusion? Simply that it’s not enough to acquire first-class technology. You also need the right organizational structures, training, and leadership to take advantage of that technology. Today, the U.S. is the undisputed leader in high-tech hardware but our government bureaucracy is still designed to fight mirror-image adversaries from the Industrial Age—not nimble, decentralized foes like Al Qaeda. We need to transform the government in order to realize the potential of Information Age warfare and avoid the fate of previous superpowers, from the Ottomans to the British, which saw their influence wane because they couldn’t keep pace with Revolutions in Military Affairs.
Steven Hayward, Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, & the Making of Extraordinary Leaders (newly released in paperback). Steve's book grew from what he intended to be a few paragraphs comparing Churchill and Reagan in the forthcoming conclusion to his two-volume Age of Reagan. The few paragraphs could not be contained, and overflowed into a long essay of 170 pages plus notes. The book sets forth an Aristotelian consideration of statesmanship using the Plutarchian "parallel lives" method. Steve possesses deep, intimate knowledge of both Churchill and Reagan, having written books on each, though he deploys his learning lightly. This is a book that could easily be read by high school students studying modern history. It is rich, rewarding, and inspirational -- a timely book to lift our minds from the concerns of the moment in order to contemplate "the peaks of human excellence," on which, as Steve recalls in his conclusion, Leo Strauss located Churchill at the time of Churchill's death in 1965.
