Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton

Subtitled “Hired Guns in the War on Terror.” Pelton is an travel-adventure-journalist better known for his series on “The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” In this illuminating bit of journalism on the rise of private mercenary armies, like Blackwater, Executive Outcomes, or Triple Canopy, Pelton explores the world of the private military contractor, from Baghdad to Central Africa.

Some fascinating details: Contractors, primarily made up of former special forces, SAS, or police officers, are usually hired by private firms to provide security in guarding fixed position installations (offices, etc.) or security for transporting goods. These guys are armed to the teeth, paid well, and subject to virtually no governmental oversight. As a result, there are likely as many as 100,000 private mercenary soldiers at large in the world, who report only to the highest bidder. Some companies, like Eric Prince’s Blackwater, operate hand-in-hand with the US Federal Government. Others, like Sandline or Executive Outcomes can be employed for far more nefarious purposes, like overthrowing governments in Equatorial Guinea, or seizing diamond mines in Sierra Leone. In this shadowy world, civilian deaths are common (particularly in Africa and Iraq) and contractors are held to no legal standards, and no moral standards but whatever they bring in with them. It’s a fascinating brave-new-world of steroid monkies and ex-cops toting automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and private gunships in some of the world’s least stable places for fantastic sums of money.

Pelton does a good job of keeping relatively neutral on the topic, neither condemning nor deifying the cowboy contractors. He poses thoughtful questions about the role of such large corporate armies in nation building. Interesting book.

Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s essays are as good as his novels, if occasionally equally unfocused. In this collection, written between 1982-1992 we get some pre-Fatwah Rushdie. He is younger, perhaps a bit more arrogant in some ways, and just as outspoken and bright. These essays, about politics, literature, history, sports, and music ramble across themes, but always return to the notion of home as more than a location. There are a total of almost seventy-five essays here, which reveal a mind that is unable to rest with comfortable definitions or life unexamined.

This book seems to be out of print. I looked high and low for a second copy to give to LT, (whom I thought might find Rushdie’s comments on Borges interesting) but was unable to find it in any new bookstore. So if you find a copy somewhere at a used bookstore, grab it and run like hell!

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie

Oh sir, you have done it yet again. Read mostly in the Fairmont Waterfront on the Vancouver harbor in the first month of the year, this fine collection of essays landed in a suitcase and didn’t get finished until a different man read it months later in Puerto Vallerta. I suppose that’s fitting, since Rushdie himself wrote this as a lot of different men over a span of years from 1992 to 2002. And reader, let me tell you, you’re in for a treat. In 400 pages of dense, playful, angry, erudite and brilliant essays covering a wide range of topics, from The Wizard of Oz, to English footie, to his thoughts on the fatwa, Rushdie reminds us that he’s not just an important writer – he’s an important thinker. We get Christianity, judiasm, islam (of course), Pinochet, oral sex, infanticide, partition, Mercator projections, Bono, Bridget Jones, Ghandi, Babur, globalization, Nabakov, 9/11, Sammy Beckett, Kosovo, Elian Gonzales, Bush & Cheney, Yates & Faiz, tabloids, and a treasure trove of other topics.

This is a fantastic collection of essays, and as the title indicates, keeps coming back to a central theme that must have been very much on Rushdie’s mind at this time: lines, borders, their crossing; in short, the transgressive.

I’ll stop now, from fear that further expressing my admiration for Rushdie may begin to border on the sycophantine.

Dreams from my Father by Barak Obama


This fine and earnest biographical memoir reveals that we have just elected a first rate mind to be the next president of the United States. Written shortly after his graduation from Harvard Law, Obama gives us a history of his life and a superb meditation on race in America.

From his childhood in Indonesia to his troubled adolescence in Hawaii, through to the ghettos of Chicago in which he worked as a community organizer, and finally on to his father’s grave in Kenya, Mr. Obama writes with clarity, just the right amount of detail, and a degree of lyricism which is surprising from someone who has become a career politician.

The book is candid, and no doubt proved politically inconvenient at points; he speaks frankly of things and describes situations which most politicians would be tripping over themselves trying to disown.

I loved this book, bought and gave out two copies immediately after reading it. I hope that Sherry enjoys the book as much as I did.

This book made me even more proud of the choice we collectively made. Dreams from my Father suggests that perhaps we have our first philosopher-president in a very long time.

Profiles in Courage by John Kennedy


What a fine reminder that once upon a time, politicians were statesmen too. Luckily for the entire world, I think that such a time may have come again now that we’ve elected Barak Obama. But I get ahead of myself, because when I read this book, the election was still weeks away, and I still had some concern that the forces of ignorance would once again carry the day in the US of A. So I turned to a book I’d long heard mentioned by a man whose life was over long before I was born, but whole legacy of nobility in politics inspired a generation.

Written while he was a freshman senator, Kennedy’s book provides compelling and heartfelt portraits of other members of the US Senate who provided examples of political courage, typically by doing something that was against the common grain, was political suicide, or both. Sam Houston, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Taft, and one or two others. It is impressive, filled with historical portraits which are interesting and motivational. In particular, Kennedy’s descriptions of Daniel Webster portray him as perhaps the greatest American ever to live, and make me want to read more about him.

I’m disappointed to read that Kennedy is now believed to have not been wholly responsible for writing this book; apparently he had a lot of help. In any case though, this doesn’t cheapen the work. It is still a fascinating, occasionally moving collection of biographical sketches of politicians who were motivated by higher values than a need for reelection or a desire for power. Profiles in Courage should serve to remind us all that the US Congress is, for all its faults, a courtroom in which moral choices which shape our future and reflect our national character are tried. Though our leaders may too often be found wanting, the institution provides a venue in which the best in us can sometimes be found on display.

The Prize by Daniel Yergin


At long last I finished Yergin’s masterpiece! The Prize is a sprawling epic history of the oil industry, from the discovery of the first well outside of Titusville, PA. leading all the way up to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

Yergin’s opus was recommended to me by the Senator, who makes his living at least in part from the shuffling of international hydrocarbon resources. Weighing in at a dense nine-hundred pages, the book is nothing if not comprehensive. Yergin gives us a month by month accounting of the major incidents, deals, players and follies of almost everyone involved in oil from the mid-nineteenth century to near the present. This book is remarkably informative; I now know vastly more geography, political history, and way more about oil exploration, processing, and sales than I did before. Yergin’s writing is tight but filled with the kind of delightful anecdotes and details that humanize what could otherwise be a dry account of a history of industry.

Oddly, if anything, the book isn’t quite long enough. I’d love to read a revised new edition that dealt with the critical decade since the first gulf war. Oil and the politics and economics that surround it are a critical piece of understanding how the modern world works. It seems that this truism is becoming only more the case as we move towards the middle of the twenty-first century. We are all still Hydrocarbon Man, and look to continue to be for quite some time.

And just to be blunt: I really, really enjoyed reading this book. Found it fascinating, and it significantly changed the way I think about some elements of our world. Great work, Dr. Yergin!

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein


Milton Friedman, economic godfather of the modern neoconservative movement preached an extremist form of lassiez-faire capitalism. Friedman and his disciples from the Chicago School of Economics have shaped the growth of the modern free trade movement in countries from Chile to Russia to South Africa to the Maldives. But is the Chicago school doctrine, which calls for flat taxes, globalism, multinational corporations which replace most traditional functions of the state actually good for the citizens of those countries in which it has been implemented? Naomi Klein definitely doesn’t think so.

Klein’s work here is brilliantly researched and painstakingly footnoted. Her arguments are generally persuasive. She tracks Friedmanism and a corresponding destruction of democracy and worsening welfare of the body politic from Pinochet’s Chile to the corporatized Green Zone of modern day Iraq.

I can’t help but feel that Klein could have benefitted from a slightly tighter focus. Her attempts to draw a parallel between the sensory-deprivation, LSD and shock treatment experiments of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA and the economic “shock therapy” of Friedmanic capitalism seems strained. Indeed, the whole metaphor of extremist capitalism as torture writ large upon a population ends up seeming weak. It presupposes the value judgment that Dr. Klein hopes to lead the reader to, weakening her arguments. This lack of focus occasionally pokes it’s head up in other ways as well – as with Klein’s comments about the benefits of the Canadian health care system, which, while accurate, end up reminding the reader that Klein is anything but open minded about her topic. As an avid anti-globalist, and a democratic socialist, Klein has wonderful insights, and has done great research; let them stand on their own. Descending into rhetoric which is outside the scope of the core argument distracts the reader, and ultimately slightly tarnishes Klein’s credibility.

This mild criticism aside, the book is a fascinating five hundred page tour through failed experiments in capitalism by the World Bank, IMF, and the US military-industrial complex. Klein walks the same halls as did Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. But where Perkins came across as a bit of a self-aggrandizing hack, Klein is an eloquent, thorough scholar.

This book is a fascinating expose into the economic theory which has driven a particular brand of US foreign policy over the last half-century. If half the goateed teenagers protesting the WTO talks in Seattle had been even slightly as bright and well informed as is Dr. Klein, it’s likely that the world might have paid a lot more attention to their protests. This is the most articulate anti-globalism screed I’ve ever read.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Bryson has created a primer for the physical sciences which should be a part of every ninth grade curriculum. This book is funny, fascinating, and extraordinarily informative. The title is remarkably apt; by the time you’ve reached the end of the book’s five hundred plus pages, you will know a great deal more about almost everything, from whales, to magnetism, to mathematics, to microbiology and cosmology. Bryon begins with the remarkable fact of your existence, and carries you through to several possible end of days scenario, stopping to have tea with nearly every major scientist and thinker of the last five hundred years along the way. And did I mention that it’s a delightfully funny book? Seems impossible, but it’s true. If A Short History of Nearly Everything were required reading in highschool or middle school in North America, within ten years, we would see our global math and science disadvantage shrinking. It really is that kind of inspiring. At least it was to me. By the end of each chapter, I found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s what I’m going to devote my life to studying! I never knew there was so much we still don’t understand about that topic!”

I will briefly address some critics who have (correctly) pointed out that Bryson shies away from delving too deeply into any particular topic, instead seeming to reach a certain point of complexity and then pull his focus away with a sort of “and gee isn’t this all just fascinating!” attitude. This is an accurate criticism of this book. As a primer on nearly everything, it doesn’t give you textbook depth of detail on any of the topics it covers, preferring instead to give you a rudimentary knowledge of the topic, the challenges, the current state of the art, and the major players in the field. For my money, that’s more than enough. If you want more on a particular topic, go buy books on that topic. As a primer and an onramp, ASHONE does what it intends to do.

I finished this one somewhere around three am over the pacific ocean in February. Upon arrival at home, I immediately bought copies for Mike, Vic & LAF, hoping that they would be as inspired by it as I was.

Run, don’t walk to get this book and read it. Thanks, Mr. Bryson.

Pareto & Mosca by James H. Meisel

As is easy to do these days, I found myself incensed and fascinated by the current political climate in the United States. The last few years have provided a fascinating study in the breakdown of the democratic process at the hands of a few corrupt elites. But it seems clear that this sort of behavior is nothing particularly new. It wasn’t new with Mills obseverved a similar clustering of Power Elites in the post Eisenhower days. It wasn’t new in the Roman Senate. Corrupt and elite individuals or cabals seem to have been excercising their power in ways which are not necessarily in line with the common weal for as long as monkeys have been talking to one another.

So I started blogging on the topic a little here: http://unfettereddiscourse.blogspot.com/

My great social and political science mentor, Columbia University graduate and ex-CIA analyst recommended that I check out Pareto & Mosca if I wanted to better understand some early Italian philosophers’ take on the relationships between the individual and the state, which seemed to have some significant bearing on the topic.

So I read and skimmed my way through this somewhat dusty tome, very impressed by how currently relevant the work of these two great minds still is today.

A fascinating if somewhat arcane look at two early social / political scientists.