What Are You Currently Reading? 2014

[omarali50]

Updated a bit to clarify a couple of things: The author has collected a lot of information (some of it new, a lot of it not well known) and it would have been a 5 star book if he had stuck to telling great stories; but he also wants to right historical wrongs and sell the book as some sort of “explanation” of how and why the modern Middle East became what it did. In this respect, he rarely rises above the “Guardian” level of fashionable BS; it would have been so much better if he had tried to just tell us the stories without attempting to justify the sub-title (War, deceit, imperial folly and the making of the modern Middle East) since this is actually NOT a book written at that level and shouldn’t pretend to be one.
And don’t expect this to be a good description of the long and confused war fought in that region from 1914 to 1918. Several major events are mentioned and some British defeats are described in greater detail, but almost always without any systematic description of the fronts, the opposing armies, or the bigger economic or military picture in the region (touched upon, but not systematically described, analyzed, etc.).
Still, worth reading if you want to know more about some very interesting characters (first and foremost Lawrence, but also Kurt Prufer, William Yale, Aaron Aaronson, etc) and their adventures in the region. But unless you are willing to blindly trust the author’s judgement in picking and choosing what to highlight and what to ignore (and I would not), you cannot take this anecdote-heavy account as a balanced and accurate account of the forces at play, much less a good analysis of why things turned out the way they did.
Some old-fashioned readers may also find his “postmodern” mean-spiritedness a bit jarring. A lot of “heroes” need to be taken down a peg, but there is an air of smug moral superiority about this author that some may find a bit off-putting.
Still, worth reading for the detailed stories alone.http://www.brownpundits.com/2014/01/...nce-in-arabia/

and my comments about Empires of the Silk Road http://www.brownpundits.com/2014/01/...the-silk-road/

[omarali50]

Correction request above - done by Moderator.

[AmericanPride]

I have a book on my reading list (for class) titled Hanoi's War by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen that I will get to in a couple of weeks. I'm excited about reading this one.

[carl]

Hanoi's War is a superb book.

[Backwards Observer]

The Whole Heart of Tao by John Bright Fey

…

Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975 translated by Merle Pribbenow

review - air and space power journal

…

Crazy From The Heat by David Lee Roth

review - publisher's weekly

interview - vhlinks

video

[Johannes U]

and so little time to read .
Wrong turn by Col Gian Gentile
The end of history and the last men by Francis Fukuyama
The soldier and the state by Samuel P Huntington
The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency by Paul B Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds)
The latest edition of The Journal of Military Operations (a big praise for that one)
The latest Edition of The Military Review
...

[carl]

I just finished War on the Waters by McPherson. It is a short history of two navies in the Civil War. It is a good overall narrative of the war on the salt and fresh water and does a good job of showing how important those operations were to the overall war effort, especially the huge and critically important contribution the Union Navy made to the defeat of the CSA.

One thing of interest from the small war point of view is the problem the Federal forces had in protecting their river supply lines from Confederate irregular forces. The rivers could be considered the MSRs of their day-MSR Tennessee and MSR Cumberland so to speak-and the steamers plying them were subject to attack via field artillery and small arms from the shore. What the Union Navy did was to arm and armor (lightly armored , hence 'tinclads') other river steamers and use them for convoy escort and patrol. An example tactic cited was a column of cargo steamers on its way with a number of tinclads interspersed. That sounds familiar.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Waters-Con.../dp/B0093A42XY