D. Martin

An add for the author's much more expensive services

Revisado: 08-11-24

Like a lot of self-help, this book is long on descriptions of how great your life will be once you've finished and on descriptions of the credentials of everyone involved, but short on actual advice. If you find yourself feeling underwhelmed though, don't worry, the author would LOVE for you to check out her webpage and buy her expensive personalized services.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Get the paper book

Revisado: 10-08-21

I generally recommend the content of the book, but will direct you to other reviewers on that.

But, as an Audible platinum member who always renews early, listens to tons of audiobooks and podcasts to boot, I just could not follow this book on audio, and I recommend you don't try to. The fault is more with the postmodernists themselves than with Pluckrose, but I kept reminding and eventually just got the kindle version. I suggest you learn from my experience and start there instead.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Why bother when you already know how it’ll end?

Revisado: 12-16-19

As I write this in December 2019, it’s become quite fashionable to review various memorable historical examples of presidential crimes and misdemeanors. Watergate is the most obvious choice, but there are plenty of other possibilities: perhaps Iran-Contra is more similar to the Ukraine mess, or maybe the Andrew Johnson impeachment is the better analog for Trump. Even the Whiskey Ring has generated a little attention, but I've waited in vain for any sign of renewed interest in Teapot Dome. Still, as an impeachment trial that everyone already knows the outcome to has swung into high gear, I decided the time had finally come learn about Monicagate.

Is this the best Clinton Impeachment book out there? I can’t tell you; it’s the only one I read. Overall, it was quite a smooth listen. But is there any point in learning all the details of an impeachment when you already know the ending? By choosing to write this book, Toobin has proven that he’s biased on this question, the correct answer to which is no. I recommend that you not read this book, and stop reading this review right now. From here on out, you only have yourself to blame.

The book spends most of its time setting up the pieces of the impeachment, so that the actual senate trial ends up a bit of an afterthought, taking only about 15 minutes. Overall, this is quite effective, and I have petitioned Chief Justice Roberts to take the same strategy in next month’s senate trial. The bulk of the book follows the Starr inquiry, going through his investigations into Whitewater, Travelgate, campaign finance, and the Vince Foster suicide; as well as the Paula Jones lawsuit. Toobin does review Alan Dershowitz’s famous assertion that Bill Clinton should have defaulted in the Paula Jones case, and that his not doing so was the single greatest legal blunder of the 20th century. Toobin’s take: This was an inspired, if absolutely insane idea. What were Paula Jones’ motivations in all this? There were plenty of opportunities when she could have made out better than she ultimately did, getting about $200,000. Certainly some of Jones' allies understood clearly from the beginning that the real goal was never to win the suit, but rather to get some dirt on Bill Clinton. Jones didn't seem to want this exactly at first, but like many of the characters in this story, as the fight dragged on, she seemed to lose track of her own incentives and become more fixated on hurting her opponent.

The best example of this phenomenon is probably Ken Starr and the Lewinsky immunity deal. Lewinsky’s lawyer, Alan Ginsburg, had negotiated full immunity (which for technical reasons is called “transactional immunity”) against charges that she had lied in her deposition in the Jones Case about having sex with Clinton, i.e., literally the exact same high crime as Clinton's. Now, everyone agreed that it would be crazy to prosecute a 22-year old for lying about a consensual relationship she had had—with the president no less—in a lawsuit to which she wasn’t even party, which was probably why the Office of the Independent Counsel faxed (faxes!) a transactional immunity deal to Lewinsky for her to sign and return, which she did. At this point, Alan Ginsburg performed his eponymous act, the Full Ginsburg, going on all five of the Washington Sunday Morning Shows. He said something that hurt Ken Starr’s feelings, at which point Starr refused to countersign the immunity deal his office had sent. Ginsburg, sensibly enough, sued Starr, arguing that if a federal prosecutor sends you an immunity deal on government stationary, they can’t just call backsies. As Toobin puts it, Starr probably would have done better to lose this action, but he didn’t, so instead he spent the next several months of mid-1998 trying to make the case that Clinton had lied about having sex with Lewinsky without Lewinsky’s testimony. Again, all because he was upset with something Lewinsky’s lawyer had said on TV! Eventually, Monica hired a different lawyer and got essentially the same immunity they had agreed to months earlier. At this point, Starr got the blue dress, subpoenaed Bill Clinton to testify, withdrew the subpoena in exchange for a voluntary 4-hour interview, and then rushed out his report just in time for the 1998 midterms. Or maybe the whole thing was Starr’s plan all along to get the report out at what he thought would be just the right moment to help Republicans in the election, showing once more what a political hack he was. That’s the thing about the Clinton impeachment: it’s all open to interpretation.

Probably the best reason to read this book is to pin down all the fun little sordid details that, if you're like me, you remember only vaguely. Yes, Lewinsky performed oral sex on Clinton while he was on the phone with congressmen, on multiple occasions. Yes, he stuck a cigar in her (Audible wants me to remove the last word from this sentence; it works without it). On the day they met, she lifted up her shirt to show him the top of her thong. But really the details don’t matter, and the caricatures of the main characters are all spot-on: Lewinsky is comically naïve and love-addled, Ken Starr is an obsessed political operative badly feigning legal detachment, Paula Jones is low-class and under the sway of savvier operators, Linda Tripp is a monster, and Bill Clinton is a sleazy lying politician.

I would be remiss in this review if I failed to mention Toobin's central thesis for the book, which is that starting around the 1970s, lawyers began a sort of stealth takeover of American politics (the real vast conspiracy). They did this, according to Toobin, through two strategies: first, using targeted litigation to select and elevate the cases they wanted in order to set the right precedents and thereby change the law through the legal rather than the legislative process; and second, by targeting uncooperative politicians with legal harassment through nuisance lawsuits and prosecutions. Frankly, despite Toobin’s best effort to convince me otherwise, these still seem like two distinct threads to me, rather than like two sides of the same coin. The second is a fair enough description of what happened to Bill Clinton; the first enters into the story mainly as background about the evolution of sexual harassment law. Perhaps Toobin is correct about the arc of late-20th century law and politics, but frankly it seemed more like the topic of the book he wished he were writing, rather than an organic takeaway from the Clinton saga.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

Best Bob Mueller book; still not worth your time

Revisado: 01-24-18

I'm going to go ahead and assume you're considering this book as a source of insight into Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That wasn't what the author had in mind when he wrote it of course. The book is intended as an exploration of the FBI's role in terrorism cases, dating back to the 1970s but with its primary focus on the post-9/11 GWOT. To a lesser extent, the book is a general history of the FBI as well, but if that's what you're looking for, you'd probably do better with Tim Weiner book "Enemies."

Frankly, there's just a lot of hours of book here for the amount of Bob Mueller insights you're going to get. The profile you get is the same as any brief sketch of the man: He's a serious guy who doesn't socialize much, a former marine who goes to church on Sundays. He works long hours and tells the same jokes over and over, which weren't that funny to begin with. The author clearly conducted hours of interviews with Mueller, and the narrative has a slightly odd relationship with its primary subject (for example, the book will state matter-of-factly that such-and-such a case was the most something or other--difficult, emotional, etc.--case of Bob Mueller's career, when it would feel more natural to say that Bob Mueller said in an interview that this case was the most whatever of his career), but not a lot of color really comes through. Apparently his cell phone rang the first time he met President Bush.

In any event, if you decide to go for it, consider skipping to chapter 10 (in the audible sectioning, not the actual tenth chapter of the book), time code 31:38. There's essentially no Mueller before that. The earlier part is about the fight over COINTELPRO in the 70s, the Pizza Connection case of the 80s (which is not really terrorism, but is about the FBI developing its international capabilites with Italian organized crime), and fights between Louis Freah and Bill Clinton in the 90s. I think Mueller comes up a little bit before this time stamp in connection with the Lockerbie case, which he prosecuted, but there's really not much about him there. Again, if this pre-9/11 FBI stuff is what interests you, you may do better with "Enemies."

The actual focus of the core of the book is on how the FBI was affected by 9/11, how it interacted with the CIA and military over this period, and the various bureaucratic fights that took place. There are some interesting stories here, such as the FBI interrogation of Saddam Hussein, the expansion of the FBI's operations overseas, and various cross-agency fights over torture and Gitmo. Some of it is interesting in the way recent history is, for making sense of things that were less clear in newspapers at the time. It's crazy to learn that for years George W. Bush got daily briefings on low-level intelligence about terrorist threats. At the time, many alleged that the administration was using the heightened fear of terrorism for political gain. In some sense, they undeniably did, but what hindsight makes clear is that they weren't just cynically trying to freak out the American people, they had clearly freaked themselves out too.

The most important recurring theme of the book is the complex interplay between law enforcement and intelligence gathering, and how the FBI is unique in being responsible for both. The forced separation between these two functions following COINTELPRO was likely responsible for some of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, although it seemed to me the author overstated this somewhat to tell a cleaner story. After 9/11, many argued that the intelligence functions of the FBI should be separated out to form a new agency akin to Britain's MI-5. Many others though, including Mueller, argued that law enfocement and intelligence gathering are not as different as they seem: both are about gathering and analyzing evidence, and intelligence threats essentially always involve criminal activity. Clearly, this view won the day. To the extent that the book has a message relevant to the 2018 Russia investigation, this would seem to be it. Some critics of the Special Counsel's Office have argued that Russian interference in the election should be treated as an intelligence matter rather than a criminal one. This argument has always seemed disingenuous; it's also, apparently, a false dichotomy Bob Mueller has been fighting against for years.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 22 personas

Fascinating stuff... for college freshmen

Revisado: 03-13-15

This book has a gee whiz aspect to it that I found irritating. The author begins with an anecdote about how he begins his freshman course at Stanford by bringing a newspaper into the class and showing how all the stories on the front page (Patriots Win Superbowl?) have something to do with law. If that sounds exciting and insightful to you, this may be the book for you. If it sounds like a pretty banal observation, pass this one up. The book lacks a coherent focus, and seems to delight in the sort of random factoids that are designed, again, to make an impression on college freshmen: early American law had a lot of provisions to deal with slavery. Umm, ok, so what? I think the author wants us to scratch your head and say "if law was wrong about the morality of slavery, what other moral issues could it be wrong about?" I'd like to think this wouldn't have struck me as deep even when I was a college freshman. He also makes frequent reference to the work of actual scholars without providing actual citations or context--again the sort of thing to whet the appetite of freshmen without scaring them off (or allowing them to check your claims and demonstrate that their professor has no clothes).

Here's the good news: it turns out that audible has a lot of interesting books on law, many targeted at law school students rather than undergraduates. I'm pretty new to the area myself, so I can't provide great recommendations, but keep looking and you'll find something worthwhile.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Don't think of education as an elephant

Revisado: 08-17-14

You know the story of the blind men and the elephant: one feels the trunk and says it's a tree branch, another feels the ear and says it's a fan... Green seems strangely determined to cast the various reform movements in education in this spirit, as all essentially striving for the same thing, even as they differ in their particulars. Having listened to the book, I see this as fundamentally wrongheaded. Various reform agendas are clearly at odds, and for any one to be right, many of the others must be wrong. Ironically, good teaching confronts students' incorrect beliefs about a subject rather than trying to synthesize them into an incoherent whole (check out the classic teaching video "A Private Universe" if you haven't seen it). It may feel good to say we're all in this together and playing for the same team, but if that's not true, pretending it's so will only lead to muddled thinking and bad policy.

I'm guessing Green's credulity stems in large part from her proximity to her subjects. She's not a teacher or a social scientist, but a journalist, and the book has the feel of a string of irreconcilable magazine pieces, each about the latest fad or reformer, strung together. The splits probably come through more clearly in the print version, but from listening I'd pick out the following key ideas/sections: 1) the key to good teaching is to get inside your students' heads and understand what lead them to the wrong answers; 2) the key to good teaching is for teachers to observe one another and talk about tiny details of teaching (to me, this was the most compelling case in the book by far); 3) the key to good teaching is scalability/training since it's easy to improve one classroom or even school, but there's millions of teachers out there; 4) the key to good teaching is for "entrepreneurs" to bring business skills into the education sector; 5) relatedly, the key is to instill discipline in students (to me, these two points were by far the weakest, and Green presents plenty of evidence for their failure, but refuses to come out and say clearly that they're wrongheaded, again I think because she's too close to her subjects and found the education entrepreneurs so personable); 6) the key to good teaching is "rigor", although what this means is unclear--it's the missing element when discipline produces students who know their multiplication tables but still suck at math; 7) the key to good teaching is "infrastructure", i.e. providing resources (curriculum, test banks, etc.) to teachers, but this is tricky because it sounds like she's supporting the worst elements of test-based standards, which leads to a long and seemingly misplaced discussion of federalism in US education policy; 8) the key to good teaching is to love your students.

It's worth noting the few cross-cutting themes, and the ideas that Green does reject. While she makes frequent reference to studies by economists showing the value of good teachers, she argues strongly that teaching skill is not (always) innate, and thus that teachers shouldn't be dropped for bad results, but retrained instead. Perhaps, but surely there's some degree of aptitude, and willingness. She discusses, for example, how New Math failed in the classrooms of many well-intentioned teachers who simply didn't understand it. But surely there are also teachers who weren't/aren't well-intentioned, who will insist on doing things their way even if the research shows it's ineffective. What should we do with these teachers?

Ending the book with "all you need is love" really makes it clear that Green, after years of research, has no coherent thesis or plan for what needs to be done. That's fine, plenty of others have spent longer in the field and don't have all the answers either. But I would like to see her own up to this a little more, and be a bit more critical of the teaching professionals she profiles. This is probably the best book on teaching and education reform out there (the other obvious contender being "How Children Succeed") and it's a worthwhile listen. Just approach it with some criticality. You know, like you should have learned in school.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

A strange take, and a mountain of detail

Revisado: 04-19-14

This is a hard book to review. I'm glad I listened to it, but I feel like I can't strongly recommend you do so. It's not a very enjoyable listen. I found myself frequently turning it off, even when I was doing nothing terribly important. It's full of detail that perhaps is important to making the author's case (though I question that), but which very few people will ever absorb let alone recall.

What I liked most about Freeman's perspective is that he engages his historical subjects as human beings. I remember from my required freshman humanities courses a constant refrain about how we can't impose our values on the past, that historical figures like Augustine need to be related to on their own terms, and that looking at them through something like a modern psychoanalytic lens is just wrong. Freeman is, unapologetically, more a popular writer than an historian or humanist, and he doesn't dilly dally around with this. He shows that early Christian thinkers asked the sort of questions you'd expect sensible people to ask when confronted, in a serious way, with nonsense: was Jesus less than God the father since the latter created (begot--what does that even mean?) the former? Was Jesus created at the beginning of time, or was he there before that? Did he assume his human essence at birth, or did he exist in Mary's womb? Freeman attempts to connect this line of inquiry directly with the tradition of Greek thought: early Christian scholars were trained at schools that could trace their origins back to Plato. These early scholars could frame solid philosophical arguments and could debate (and felt able to debate without fear of earthly or heavenly reprisal) at a high level, whereas later Medieval scholars had lost this ability. I'm no expert, but I found this line line of argument compelling.

The obvious conclusion from Freeman's arguments both in this and his previous book (which I have not read) is pro-secular: Christianity, and more generally religion, closed the Western mind. From his introduction, Freeman is clearly unhappy being associated with this view. He makes the obligatory swipe at New Atheism before sketching out a subtler thesis: It wasn't religion or (mono)theism that ended the tradition of free inquiry in Western thought for a thousand years, it was rather the intervention of the state into religious matters, especially in a religious conclave of 381. This is the core of Freeman's argument, and the main point on which I'm unconvinced. There are several lines of attack, but I'll just take one: that state intervention to resolve the never-ending disputes of the early Christian church was inevitable well before 381 given the interminable and destabilizing nature of the disputes themselves. This was clearly the perspective of many of the state actors (various emperors especially) who Freeman quotes. In the end, I felt like Freeman was trying to thread a needle (with a camel).

Freeman has a strange reverence for philosophical debates, even when they fall into the Seinfeld category of debates about nothing. Again, I like that he engages with these historical disputes without condescending to them, but I feel like there's way more detail than there needs to be. This is, unfortunately, usually what happens with scholars who are questioned: they write another book that reads like the endnotes to their first book. At the same time, Freeman's lack of academic chops shine through in his failure/refusal to engage with, or really give any sense at all of, the existing literature. I have no idea which pieces of Freeman's argument are novel and which are well-trodden. I'm also unclear (I assume these are in actual endnotes of the print version) what his sources are, or how this information about the 3rd and 4th century came down to us. That would have been quite interesting to discuss in the text, I think.

I hope this makes clear why I say I'm glad I listened to it but I don't recommend it. As for the narrator: yes, he has an annoying way of ending every sentence like it's a cliffhanger. But it honestly stopped bothering me pretty quickly, and I doubt you'll find it a problem.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Lewis wasn't first, but he's still best

Revisado: 04-06-14

Perhaps the biggest criticism of this book is that it teaches us nothing new (and Lewis' smug press tour is more than a little self-aggrandizing). That's surely true for people close to the topic, and it's true that the book "Dark Pools," also on audible, covered most of the same ground two years ago. But while most people have heard of high-frequency trading, remarkably few people really understand how it works, let alone are able to explain it. Narrative matters, and Lewis is a master storyteller with a gift for finding compelling characters. I struggled through Dark Pools, but eagerly devoured Flash Boys, and it's clear that Flash Boys may yet change the world (at least a little) in a way Dark Pools did not. Perhaps the other big criticism of this book is that it only gives a surface gloss of what HFT is all about. This is also somewhat true, and also doesn't really matter. You won't come away from this book with the knowledge to open your own high frequency trading firm, but you will get what it's all about.

This is partly because HFT is simply not rocket science. There's a just-so story about a lot of physics PhDs moving to Wall Street and applying their super intellects to outwit the mere mortals who preceded them. In fact, HFT is all about being faster, not smarter; and as Lewis makes clear, the smartest people on Wall Street are often the tech guys in the back room making the computers work and being paid a fraction of what the traders get. Yes, the markets are extremely complicated, but that's all built-in, obstacles added by the exchanges to help their best clients: the high frequency traders.

Lewis wasn't able to get away from intelligence hero worship altogether though. The people he chronicles always turn out somehow to be the smartest, and quirkiest guys in the room. From early in the book (and even before reading it), I was wondering: why not just build a short delay into everyone's orders to prevent HFT? I figured it must turn out to be more complicated than this, and I'm sure there are wrinkles, but that's basically the answer you come to after 300 pages/10 hours. But then there's a problem: they want to slow the traders down, which means adding a few hundred extra miles of fiber optics (I don't understand why this couldn't be done with software--possibly for regulatory reasons--but no matter), but they don't want to make the brokers connect to their service in Indiana. What could they do? In Lewis's telling, these geniuses sit around their scrappy startup office, wracking their brains through tense hours until inspiration strikes the cleverest among them: why not just coil the fiber round and round? I mean, where does this level of brilliance even come from? Why, this guy could be the hero of his own Ayn Rand novel!

This somewhat unctuous (to his preferred interviewees) quality of Lewis's writing is not helped at all by the narration of Dylan Baker, who has narrated a number of Lewis' books and has the verbal equivalent of botox-induced constant surprise face. Every sentence is the most shocking thing he's ever heard in his life. It's strange, but you get used to it, and at this point it just sounds like Michael Lewis to me.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

A bizarrely partial biography

Revisado: 03-30-14

Arguments over Alexander Hamilton generated tremendous passion in his own time; indeed they largely defined the first decade or two of politics in the new republic. If this biography fails to rise above those old debates and give us a rounded, warts-and-all perspective on this undeniably great man, you could attribute this to Hamilton's singular extraordinariness. Ron Chernow would undoubtedly attribute it Hamilton's magnificent genius, still to polarize opinion two centuries on. I, though, blame it on Chernow being a crummy biographer.

Time and again, this book reads like a defense of Hamilton against scurrilous accusations in the contemporary political press. Some of these defenses are valid, interesting, and worth including: it appears, for example, (if you believe Chernow, though the rest of the book gives me a little pause on this) that Hamilton was in fact rather scrupulous about financial conflicts of interest, and charges of personal corruption are baseless. On the other hand, Chernow spends an inordinate amount of time defending Hamilton from accusations that come off as trivial and strange, such as that he had an undue fondness for Julius Caesar. In response, Chernow points out that Hamilton frequently compared others he disliked (e.g. Jefferson) to Caesar. This puts the lie, Chernow tells us, to the initial charges. I can't tell if Chernow is being disingenuous or if it honestly hasn't occurred to him that one way smart people win arguments is by twisting their opponents' criticisms back upon them, thereby disguising their own views.

Nobody doubts Hamilton's intelligence; time and again, he was right on weighty matters. Chernow, however, never misses an opportunity to give Hamilton credit for incredible insights when he makes the ordinary observations of a reasonably smart observer. Yes, Hamilton perceived the weakness in the Articles of Confederation from very early on. He also was convinced that guillotines were destined to roll through the streets of Philadelphia.

Chernow's reverence for Hamilton is at its strangest in his discussion of Hamilton's womanizing. Around age 14, Hamilton apparently published two love poems in a local paper, one praising an invented woman as chaste and pure, the other presenting a different woman in equally desirous terms as a vixen and Harlot. I'll grant that this is edgy and precocious, but Chernow rhapsodizes over how it demonstrates Hamilton's paradoxical complexities. Right. The truth is, Hamilton's relations with women were embarrassingly ordinary. He was a shameless flirt who wrote comically solicitous letters to women (it's hard to tell with 18th century writing, and Chernow doesn't really make this clear, but my sense is that they came off as comical to Hamilton's contemporaries as well, at least to his detractors), married a good solid woman, then fell for and had an affair with another woman whose con-artist husband proceeded to extort him.

Chernow's biased style is mostly, as I've presented it, amusing; but ultimately it really did leave me wondering if I was missing the truth. About the only thing Jefferson and Adams agreed on, for example, was that Hamilton was not to be trusted. I'm inclined to believe there was more to this than Chernow lets on. There are moments when Hamilton's real, dark faults (not the foibles of excessive pride that Chernow presents in the interest as feigned balance) shine through the cracks of Chernow's well constructed defense. During the Whiskey Rebellion, for example, Hamilton personally leads the army to Western Pennsylvania, where among other things, he spends two days personally overseeing the interrogation of a local notable before Hanilton concludes that the man is, in fact, a loyal citizen, and lets him go. Chernow claims this is exemplary behavior that should have convinced Hamilton critics--after all, he let the man go. But to me it sounds downright bizarre and creepy: spending two days dangling the prospect of execution over this unfortunate and, ultimately even in Hamilton's view innocent, man.

This is, unfortunately, the best (only) biography of Hamilton on audible at the moment. My recommendation is not to get it, and if you're interested enough in Hamilton, to search elsewhere in print. As to the big question, whether the abridged version will suffice: in my view, two thirds of this book could easily have been cut without any great loss.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

A distinct air of falseness

Revisado: 02-01-14

In both the professional reviews and the user reviews here, everyone seems to be impressed by Gates' candor and even-handedness. If I agreed, I wouldn't bother cluttering the site with another me too review, but I don't. To be sure, Gates takes us behind closed doors, both of the Pentagon and the White House, and is open about those he disliked, most often members of Congress. But in Gates's telling, very serious people are always very serious, and most leaders (especially himself) just love the troops and always find visiting wounded soldiers the most heartwarming of experiences. I kept thinking of the anecdote in Leibovitch's This Town in which Richard Holbrooke told Obama that he faced a momentous decision comparable to Johnson's over Vietnam, to which the president apparently responded "do people really talk like that?" In Gates' Washington, they do.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the book, or that I don't recommend it. I enjoyed listening to it, and found myself eagerly turning it on whenever I had downtime, which is really my standard for a good audiobook. More than anything else, it takes you back to a strange period of our recent history, when whether or not to support "the surge" was the biggest political question of the day. Additionally, Gates offers up a unique vantage point on a number of issues beyond the central themes of the Iraq and Afghan wars and internal reform at the Pentagon, from the repeal of DADT to negotiating missile defense with Russia. I do think at times the book felt repetitious, and I would have preferred it have been shorter. A note on the narration: it's slow. I recommend listening at 1.5X speed.


What follows is less a review and more a response to the book:

Ultimately, I found myself generally liking Gates, but still disagreeing with him and somewhat disapproving of his style of leadership. It seems to me that he does not present well and then dismisses the arguments of those he disagrees with. A small example first: on supplying mine resistant vehicles to troops in Iraq, he basically attributes the resistance at the Pentagon to a fear that money spent on MRAPs would mean less available for other expensive procurement programs. I don't doubt that this was a factor, and ultimately I think Gates was largely correct about the value of MRAPs, but there are many strong arguments that the enormous investment in them was a boondoggle with a little payoff and that the process was mismanaged. But if there's one group of critics that Gates seems to enjoy dismissing altogether, it's members of Congress, especially democrats. Again, I don't entirely disagree with him that many congressmen played politics with war funding bills, but it also seemed to me that when these congressmen grandstanded over being lied to by the Bush administration and even military leaders, they had a lot to point to. Obviously there was the WMD claim of 2003 (a topic Gates glosses over early in the book, saying he too, as an ex-head of the CIA, believed what he'd read in the newspaper), but beyond that there was the constant refrain that yes we were winning and no the administration had not underestimated the troop requirements, right up to the start of the surge.

If there's one thing Gates seems to hold dear (besides the troops, who he cares about more than anything, has he mentioned that recently?) it's being a team player and never ever leaking anything--leakers are a pestilence, and generals and admirals who publicly disagree with administration strategy are almost as bad. In differentiating himself from his predecessor, Rumsfeld, Gates makes clear that he welcomes vigorous debate before a decision, but that after a decision is made, he expects that subordinates either publicly support it fully or quit. I agree this can be appropriate on some matters (at its best, the view is Lincolnesque), but applied too broadly it seems to me to justify the very behavior by congressmen (using hearings to score political points rather than to honestly gather information) that Gates abhors. It also encourages the insular group think that led us into war in the first place. I got the sense from that book that Gates' big advantage over other Bushies was that he was just plain smarter, and was more often right for that reason. But in many ways he was no more open to opposing views than was Cheney.

The view that Gates most often misrepresents and dismisses in the book was the case for early withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Surely, he keeps arguing, nothing could be worse for US security than losing the war(s). Maybe the Iraq War itself was a mistake, but the worst thing now would be leaving without finishing the job. This was classic late-Bush administration justification. But the argument of those favoring a preemptive withdrawal--and let me be clear, I wasn't one of them; I strongly opposed the war at the outset, but was guardedly in favor of the surge, although I'm still not sure whether I was right on the latter point, while I absolutely was on the former--was not that it would be better to let Iraq fail than to spend the blood and treasure to save it. It was (of course I'm simplifying here, there were many people with many related reasons) that Iraq was already lost, and however long we stayed we were just delaying the inevitable slide into chaos that would happen after our departure. As this book comes out in 2014 and we get word of the fall of Fallujah, this argument is again looking prescient. And honestly, having read Duty, I'm not entirely sure whether Gates disagrees with it or never really understood it.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 3 personas