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Articles from New York Review of Books
Drawing a Dog in Iraq
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, October 05, 2006
The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
Harcourt, 396 pp., $25.00
1.
The British governed Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, and with some success, between 1920 and 1932. They returned to southern Iraq in 2003 as a junior member of the US-led coalition which invaded and conquered the country. With the second British coming arrived Rory Stewart, a young soldier and diplomat. The book under review is his story of the part he played in governing, successively, two southern provinces in Iraq, Maysan and Dhi Qar, between September 2003 and June 2004. He tells how the attempt to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq led to the frustration of the conquerors, the dissolution of the state,
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Hot, Cold and Imperial
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, July 13, 2006
1945: The War That Never Ended
by Gregor Dallas
Yale University Press, 739 pp., $40.00
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 373 pp., $27.95
The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There are also questions of value: Is imperialism a good or bad thing? Should the United States sacrifice
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The Chinese Shadow: II
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, December 01, 2005
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
by Clyde Prestowitz
Basic Books, 321 pp., $26.95
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
by Ted C. Fishman
Scribner, 342 pp., $26.00
China's Urban Transition
by John Friedmann
University of Minnesota Press, 168 pp., $56.95; $18.95 (paper)
Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
by Pun Ngai
Duke University Press/Hong Kong University Press,227 pp., $79.95; $22.95 (paper)
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future
by Elizabeth C. Economy
Council on Foreign Relations/Cornell University Press,337 pp., $17.95 (paper)
1.
Three superb recent books by John Friedmann, Pun
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The Chinese Shadow
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Monday, October 17, 2005
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
by Clyde Prestowitz
Basic Books, 321 pp., $26.95
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
by Ted C. Fishman
Scribner, 342 pp., $26.00
1.
The "rise" of China has suddenly become the all-absorbing topic for those professionally concerned with the future of the planet. Will the twenty-first century be the Chinese century, and, if so, in what sense? Will China's rise be peaceful or violent? And how will this affect the United States, the current "hyperpower"? In fact, China has been "rising" for some time (after several hundred years of "fall"), but for many years its claim to notice was obscured by more exciting
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In the Führer’s Face
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, February 24, 2005
Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to World War II
by Ian Kershaw
Penguin, 488 pp., $29.95
1.
Two themes run through the life and career of Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry. The first is the decline and fall of the British aristocracy; the second is British attitudes toward Hitler and Nazi Germany. They intersect in the person of "Charley" Londonderry because he was an aristocratic survivor in an age of democratic politics who, like many of his kind, saw agreement—friendship is too strong a word—with Hitler as a way of avoiding another war which would finally destroy his kind, and the civilization for which it stood.
Londonderry was an important-enough figure
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