What Are You Currently Reading? 2010

[zenpundit]

Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan by Derek Leebaert

and

The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll

Recently finished:

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh

Next in the queue:

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak

[Backwards Observer]

Just started - Enter The Dragon - China's Undeclared War Against The U.S. In Korea 1950-51 (1988) by Russell Spurr. Looks interesting.

The 1980 campaign to rehabilitate the much-beloved General Peng Dehuai, the most prominent military victim of the Cultural Revolution (and a major figure in this narrative), undoubtedly helped my researches. So too did emerging new Chinese perceptions about the background of the Korean War. "We are taking an entirely new look at the origins of that war," one Chinese friend told me recently. Another acidly observed that "China was conned into a costly struggle for which it got little thanks." Such views have not yet surfaced officially - not while North Korea's durable dictator, Kim Il Sung, continues to play off Peking against Moscow - but this underlying disillusionment, or perhaps a new-found urge to put the Chinese viewpoint forward proved helpful. (pp. xix-xx)

Russell Spurr was based in Hong Kong for more than 20 years as the China and Far East correspondent for the London Daily Express and ABC Radio Network, and the chief correspondent and deputy editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He was one of the first Western correspondents to report from Beijing after the establishment in 1949 of the People's Republic of China.

During World War II Spurr was in the Royal Indian Navy, and served in motor gunboats through most of the Burma campaign. After the Japanese surrender, he was assigned to Kure, Japan, where he first viewed the vacant dock built for the Yamato and began to pursue the story of its demise, told in his first book A Glorious Way to Die. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed Enter the Dragon. (from Newmarket Press Author bio)

http://www.newmarketpress.com/author.asp?id=335

Amazon Link - http://www.amazon.com/Enter-Dragon-U.../dp/1557042497

Google Books - http://books.google.com.au/books?id=...page&q&f=false