Bahram Yeganeh

How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat - until the cycle begins again. No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say is original. Every argument is a pale shadow of the first and greatest debate, which erupted more than a century ago. Its themes resurface every time Americans argue whether to intervene in a foreign country.

Religion was once the primary way to understand human behavior. This was certainly true when the book Alcoholics Anonymous was written in 1939. But, we have learned much over the past 80 years. Common Sense Recovery began as the journal of a long-standing member of AA, during a time in his life when he was struggling to reconcile the religious language of Alcoholics Anonymous with his new-found atheism and scientific understanding of addiction and the recovery process.

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the backdrop ofAmerican culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?