FEW BOOKS HAVE generated as much buzz in as short a time as No Easy Day by Mark Owen,1 a former Navy SEAL who participated in the mission that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. While media have understandably focused on the bin Laden narrative, and the differences between it and the Obama administration’s story of the raid, it’s important to note something about | Read More »
THE REIGN OF RAMESSES III has long intrigued scholars and laypersons alike, both because this pharaoh’s reign took place during a watershed period in history, and because of the remarkable preservation of his majestic “Mansion of a Million Years” at Medinet Habu. With Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero (University of Michigan Press, 2012), volume editors Eric H. Cline and David | Read More »
THE ISOLATIONIST MODEL of looking at ancient civilizations, from Pharaonic Egypt to Kassite Babylonia to Classical Greece, has increasingly fallen out of fashion in recent years as more and more scholars have begun to realize, and to study, the deep interconnections between ancient civilizations, particularly from the Late Bronze Age onward. In The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History, Nancy H. Demand, professor emerita of | Read More »
IMAGINE A GOVERNMENT agency designed for the specific purpose of investigating and preventing the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms. Now imagine this agency engaging in an operation that not only goes against that purpose, but actually seeks to accomplish the opposite, by actively encouraging the sale of firearms to people whose ties to organized crime and gun violence are well known– and that | Read More »
The voluminous Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia, which boasts five sections, 52 chapters, and 54 authors, truly covers every topic that can be dealt with in 1,174 typewritten pages. Unfortunately, the attempted geographic and temporal scope – the entirety of the Anatolian peninsula over the course of nearly 10,000 years – would require several volumes this length to cover in full. As a result, some | Read More »
THE BASIC HISTORY of World War II’s European front is (or should be) well known to every western adult and schoolchild. From the offensives that brought the majority of the European continent under Axis control, to the D-Day invasion and Operation Overlord, to Hitler’s unthinkable campaign to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables,” the general flow of the first half of the 1940s has been the | Read More »
As a companion to the Coffee & Markets interview with the author here is my review of the book. With An American Spy Olen Steinhauer continues to explore both the mechanics of spy craft and the moral tension inherent in the trade using Milo Weaver as his lens. With this third volume in the series, Weaver is no longer a Tourist but can’t escape the gravity of the agency’s destruction. What | Read More »
THE ‘CYPRO–MINOAN’ SCRIPT of Bronze Age Cyprus has baffled scholars since its discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. Though it has been found in several locations on Cyprus and at the Late Bronze Age trading emporium of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, several missing pieces have prevented this script from being deciphered, despite decades of concerted attempts to unlock its meaning and read its | Read More »
THE UNPRECEDENTED INTERCONNECTIVITY in the Late Bronze Age (LBA) Eastern Mediterranean has been the subject of a great deal of study in recent years. Colloquia, conferences, articles, and monographs have dealt in depth with the diplomacy, balance of power, and widespread trade that marked this period and the migrations and collapses that marked the transition to the Early Iron Age. However, if one archaeologist’s interpretation | Read More »
Robert Kagan’s The World America Made (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) is an extended essay on the role of the United States in the current global order. Kagan identifies political and economic freedom combined with military strength as the foundation of the enduring American power that has encouraged the current historical “wave” towards democracy, and argues the unique nature of this power has played a pivotal | Read More »
SINCE THE RODNEY King riots of 1992, “Can’t we all just get along?” has been a common (and commonly misquoted) refrain in America, both among serious persons and those seeking to inject levity into tense situations. In a forthcoming book, though, retired Navy SEAL J. Robert DuBois responds to that question with a plan of action that he hopes people at home and around the | Read More »
JUST WEEKS AFTER the attacks of September 11, 2001, a small number of elite special operators were inserted into northern Afghanistan. The Degüello, by Special Forces veteran Scott Zastrow, tells the story of the first unit to deploy: ODA 555, or ‘Triple Nickel,’ an A-Team from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky’s 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Accompanied by an Air Force combat controller, the ten-man team infiltrated | Read More »
Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics is one of the better analysts of basic political trends out there, so I was looking forward to his new book The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs – and Who Will Take It. I was fortunate enough to snag a review copy for RedState, and found it to be a fairly persuasive argument | Read More »
WHAT ROLE DO culture myths – the stories civilizations tell about the beginning of law, medicine, arts and sciences, and civilization itself – have in defining a group’s legitimacy within society? In Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, Will McCants, a Middle East expert at CNA’s Center for Strategic Students and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, addresses this issue with | Read More »
**I am going to try and re-start something I had begun previously: Friday Books. Each Friday I will bring to your attention a book worth reading. Feel free to leave a comment on books you have read recently or are reading.** It is easy to lose perspective these days. What with the 2012 campaign, the struggling economy, and the often miss-the-forest-for the-trees nature of social media and | Read More »
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