Posts for 'History' Category

With money at the root, opium at the core, smugglers at the back and the Taliban in the lead, an ancient form of commerce feeds a burgeoning terror industry. Gretchen Peters is convinced that hunting down the elusive top tier leadership must be in conjunction with targeting the source of their (fire)power.

The ‘House of Terror’ has branched out. But are the pious, holier than thou Taliban ‘doing drugs’? Seeds of Terror seems to think so. But it does not cast them as drug barons or junkies but as profiteers — patrons of a trade they have perfected to an art. Peters sees.

This as an economic miracle (of sorts) given that it originates from “one of the world’s most remote and backward regions, where the transport network and infrastructure is almost completely shattered”, but where the Taliban have nevertheless “managed to integrate an agricultural product — albeit illegally — into the global economy”. This crude yet effective form of commerce keeps the clunky, soulless machine going.

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This concisely written and well documented work covers the “Truman Doctrine…the essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II.

The ideological foundation for the “imperial presidency.” Lloyd Gardner focuses his analysis on the Middle East, although the imperial trends expanded globally through.

The Americas and on into Asia as the old empires faded and the U.S. took their place.

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Chang-rae Lee's three previous novels were all commandeered by forceful narrators, each with a distinct voice and each struggling to find his moorings in a swiftly changing cultural landscape.

First was bereaved young Henry Park in "Native Speaker," followed by courtly old Doc Hata in "A Gesture Life" and midlife-tragicomic Jerry Battle in "Aloft."

In creating these affecting first-person voices, Lee proved to be as ardent a student of the American literary canon as he is a keen contributor to it, traversing the intersection between Cheeveresque suburban unease and contemporary immigration literature with uncommon fluency.

Lee's latest novel, which has been in the works for more than five years, veers into different territory. Much bleaker than his earlier books, it is, like Jayne Anne Phillips's recent "Lark and Termite.

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Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies helped pave the way for this amusing alternate history of Queen Victoria’s reign. The Queen, Prince Albert and Prime Minister Lord Melbourne along with Protektor Maggie Brown are seen in a different light as they stand up to demons and a host of other fell creatures, many of whom are historical figures. Whether it’s prostitute eating zombies taking chowing down at a party, rats or the demon Baal looking for an heir, Victorian England was never like this.

Although violence and gore abound, it is balanced by the genuine affection shown between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Queen does very little of the actual sword wielding for the first three fourths of the book and surprisingly, does not emerge as the strong figure one might expect given the title. Clearly, the author is a fan of the Alien movie series as evidenced by naming a team of solders Hudson, Hicks and Vasquez. Readers looking for an entertaining, inaccurate historical fiction will find plenty to enjoy here.

In this his latest book, John Keegan has attempted the impossible. The subtitle gives his game away. Instead of adding to the pile of chronicles of the American Civil War, he has written a critique of them, from the point of view of a deep-thinking, distinguished military historian.

But he has tried to force this admirable project into the more common form – a narrative from Fort Sumter to Appomattox Court House, in less than 400 pages. He has tried to blend two different genres and the result is that the structure suffers.

Keegan mentions everything important but does not explain everything. The book, which would have been perfect as a set of essays, is distorted by the need to chronicle as well as analyse. Both undertakings suffer from repetition.

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Crossway Books, $17, 224 pages

Reviewed by W. James Antle III

Early in "The End of Secularism," Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University talks about his religious awakening. He came to believe that if the God of the Bible existed and was active in human affairs, that had implications for his life. It made no sense, Mr. Baker concluded, to have faith in God and Christianity in the abstract but to live as if there were no God in practice.

In this slim but compelling volume, Mr. Baker argues that this is precisely what secularism asks of us: to hold our abstract religious beliefs in private but live as if there is no God in our public lives together. Religion then becomes like sex in the Victorian era: something best done in private but seldom discussed, much less seen, in public lest someone scare the horses.

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Could 1514 A.D. be just an important date in the age of Leonardo, Machiavelli and Copernicus? Is Eight Franklin Square just the address of another nondescript building in northwest Washington, D.C.?

Neither are what they seem in Dan Brown's new thriller, "The Lost Symbol," released Tuesday, a roaring ride filled with the hairpin plot turns and twisty roads that made "The Da Vinci Code" one of the most popular books of all time.

As with "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons," don't expect pages of inspired prose or even an unpredictable ending. Instead, just ride it out and have fun with a caper filled with puzzles, grids, symbols, pyramids and a secret that can bestow "unfathomable power."

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Author: Martin Jacques Publisher: Penguin Group FOR hundreds of years, the term ‘modernity’ has been synonomous with being western. This book argues things will be different with the rise of China as the Middle Kingdom reasserts itself.

Martin Jacques, with his background in international relations and politics, takes a positive view of China reassuming its traditional position at the centre of East Asia and how this will affect both politics and economics.

His main argument is that the West will no longer be dominant and the term ‘modernity’ can be defined in many ways with the new hierarchy. The old tributary system will resurface in a modern form and contemporary ideas of racial hierarchy will be redrawn and China’s sense of superiority will emerge with greater force than ever before.

So reads the front cover of this enigmatic novel. Gaston Delesdandroux has written quite the blockbuster with An American’s Story. Set in the 1950’s and 1960’s it takes us back into the Cold War.

It was raging in high gear. Although not recognized by the Dewy Decimal library system, I class this novel in the Historical Faction section. My definition of this genre is to set a fictional plot amidst an actual historical event, it is actually a very difficult genre to excel at.

You need to weave your tale within the actual events, your characters must be peripherally associated, yet not be complicit in the outcome. Gaston Delesdandroux does indeed achieve his desired outcome in An American’s Story.

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After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age. Paul Starobin. Viking (Penguin), New York, 2009. After a half decade of books on the ‘American empire’ and many more on the politics, military, religion, and economics that are pieces of the whole, a new trend is now appearing on the book market.

After the election of Obama as president, the new material is all forward looking, promoting ideas or creating possible scenarios of where the U.S. can, may, could, or should direct its energies. The general trend is the recognition that the “empire” is in significant decline, generally considered due to a combination of economic and military misadventures under the Bush regime, with recognition that it all started well before.

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