Michael

Trump proves he's smarter than Bolton.

Revisado: 08-30-20

John Bolton's “In the Room Where it Happened “provides a highly detailed description of the frustration frequently (one might say universally) felt by Donald Trump's advisors in dealing with this most unconventional of presidents. Over and over again we are reminded by Mr. Bolton, not for the first time, that Mr. Trump ignores all the accepted rules not only of presidential behavior but of the leader of any organization, large or small. Not only doesn't he read, he doesn't even listen. His intelligence briefings are apparently mostly a forum for him to give his opinions to intelligence officers rather than receive their information. He swings back and forth on issues like a pendulum and seems to make decision almost like a random number generator. He also seems embarrassingly convinced that he can personally solve all of America's foreign policy difficulties through his "personal relationship" with the leaders of our opponents. While it goes without saying that this is simply not the case (Trump to date has achieved absolutely no significant foreign policy policy agreements) nevertheless, perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have led to any remarkable mistakes. Thus although Trump sounds like a fool in appearing to believe Kim Jong Un's shameless flattery and almost like a traitor in asking Xi Jinping to assist in his reelection, when it comes to actual policy making it doesn't appear that Mr. Trump's endlessly emphasized desire to ingratiate himself with (hostile) foreign leaders has done us any harm either. We still have no agreement of any significance with North Korea and the fact that some military exercises on the Korean peninsula may have been delayed at one point or another hardly seems to have noticeably compromised our defenses there. The US is maintaining or even strengthening sanctions against Russia to force it to withdraw from Crimea (which of course will never happen) and the Donbas region of Ukraine (which might). North Korea is as isolated as it ever has been and trade relations with China are largely unchanged despite the loud ballyhooing about standing up to China. The only really significant change in US foreign policy, the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, was almost certain to have been executed by virtually any Republican president in light of the sharp partisan opposition to it. Further, Trump, to his everlasting credit, rejected the advice of virtually all of his advisors by not bombing manned Iranian military targets after the downing of an unmanned drone, concluding, quite correctly, that a counterattack that might kill up to 150 Iranians would be perceived, and would in fact be, grossly disproportional to the financial loss the US incurred through the downing of one of its expensive drones.. Remember that Jimmy Carter, when faced with the advice of all of his advisors to allow the Shah into the United States for medical treatment, rejected his own instincts and went along with the crowd with disastrous results. By contrast, Trump actually behaved quite courageously in refusing to retaliate with deadly force against an attack which merely cause property damage. This puts into perspective, and in retrospect, almost justifies, his subsequent decision to assassinate Iranians Quds Force Leader General Qasem Soleimani in response to a deadly attack on US soldiers. Trump seems to believe in an eye for an eye and not a head for a toe.

I did appreciate Mr. Bolton's in depth reporting on the various bureaucratic struggles which went on in the White House during his time there. However, it says something about Mr. Bolton's himself that with the exception of his own deputy,, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Pompeo,, virtually everybody he mentions in the White House comes in for a thrashing. Oddly enough, for a man who has made it clear that he has absolutely no trust in the president's judgment whatsoever, those he dislikes the most are former Defense Secretary Mattis and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, basically for protecting the president from himself. In fact, they seem to have done a rather good job of it, whereas Bolton seemed most inclined to appeal to the president’s worst instincts, making it clear that he saw war as the only solutions to the problems of North Korea and Iran. Trump did not agree. Good for him.

In short, I give this book 4 stars for being a very interesting and insightful description of bureaucratic warfare but I strike one from it for failing to recognize that Trump, for all his idiosyncrasies, and despite his deplorable decision to withdraw the United States from its nuclear agreement with Iran, nevertheless has managed to avoid any real foreign policy disasters. Indeed, although this is a comparison I doubt the president will appreciate, it is worth noting that he is the first president since Jimmy Carter not to initiate an invasion of a foreign country, by ground or air (by contrast, peaceniks Obama and Clinton launched devastating aerial invasions of Libya and Serbia, respectively). I can see why Mr. Bolton doesn't like him

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Oversold

Revisado: 03-04-20

The author takes a long long time to make a rather simple point: emotions reflect, rather than cause the su!rvival instincts associated with them (such as freezing, increased heartbeat and flight). Interesting, I guess, but hardly worth the time he requires listeners to wait to get to it. Had he stated his thesis upfront I would have saved a tremendous amount of time spent wading through uninteresting material.

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas

Good summary

Revisado: 04-06-18

Gives a good summary of the current state of debate over how quantum mechanics work

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Simple, entertaining and easily understood

Revisado: 03-23-18

Simple, entertaining and easily understood story of how scientists arrived at the conclusion that the Universe was 13.8 billion years old.

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More hagio than bio graphy

Revisado: 02-28-16

If you could sum up Great Catherine in three words, what would they be?

Uncritical entertaining hagiography

What was one of the most memorable moments of Great Catherine?

When a peasant revolt threatened to bring Bolshevism to Russia a century and half early

Which character – as performed by Davina Porter – was your favorite?

Potemkin

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Reformism betrayed

Any additional comments?

The author is obviously a great admirer of Katherine and seems to spend a great deal of time focussing on courtly life and relatively little on the partition of Poland or the brutal suppression of peasant revolts under her regime.

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A Celebration of China and the Chinese People

Revisado: 02-06-10

The author's research into the life of multimillionaire smuggler Lai Changxing provides the backdrop for what is really a voyage of discovery through what might be called the "Really New China", a nation being transformed by a capitalist revolution from below, led by fearless people like Mr. Lai who both work with and against officialdom in a monumental effort to transform China into a land of (economic) freedom and opportunity. The voyage is made all the more enjoyable by our effortlessly charming and instinctively poetic host, whose almost Shakesperean command of the English language is ideally suited to his epic of praise for the courageous and infintely resourceful Chinese people he so obviously loves.

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Nick Stone Goes Nuts

Revisado: 05-07-05

Andy McNab's sociopathic secret agent, Nick Stone, already made James Bond look like Ralph Nader before Dark Winter, but in DW he goes completely "off the reservation" to jeopardize the lives of millions of Brits to save the hypervulnerable object of his increasingly obsessive devotion, his mentally ill ward Kelly. The second-by-second description of undercover work sounds crushingly authentic as always, but Stone's weirdness strains credibility and left this reader frankly hoping that his ruthless masters would finally pull the plug on this far too rogue warrior - permanently.

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Drones on and on

Revisado: 10-27-04

I don't know if it was the narration or the book itself, but after mamking some initially interesting points the book began to simple drone on and on about things I really didn't care about. Either the story bored the narrator or it was just plain boring. Either was I stopped listening about half way through.

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