“Liberals will love it; conservatives won’t read it.” from the obama hate machine
THE OBAMA HATE MACHINE The Lies, Distortions, and Personal Attacks On the President—and Who Is Behind Them Press, Bill Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 17, 2012 978-0-312-64164-1 978-1-4299-4125-9 e-book
The ubiquitous liberal radio and TV pundit vigorously defends President Obama against what the author terms…well, see the subtitle. Press, who has published a number of volumes attacking Republicans and defending Democrats (Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves, 2010, etc.), writes firmly within a current political genre: books that sag with secondarysource quotations and convince no one on the other side but supply supporters with arms and ammo for coffee-shop colloquies. Press’ tactics are straightforward: He begins with the euphoria (among many) at President Obama’s inauguration, then steps away from the celebration to a consideration of the forces at work to strip the new president of credibility. The author pauses to consider nasty politics in other eras, and then identifies the übervillains in his tale: Charles and David Koch, the massively rich brothers who fund numerous pro-right organizations, including the Tea Party. Press looks at the coordinated attempts to “other” Obama by portraying him as a crypto-Muslim and terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, Nazi, communist—as one who is outside “real” America and whose U. S. citizenship is dubious. The author spends many pages describing the dozens of anti-Obama books, devotes a chapter to the Koch brothers, another to the failings of the media and ends with an odd little coda about the politics of civility. Along the way, Press blasts Dick Morris (“the most amoral man in American politics today”), Michele Bachmann (“batshit crazy”), Fox News and its commentators, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. Liberals will love it; conservatives won’t read it.
THE DARK DEFILE Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842
Preston, Diana (352 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 14, 2012 978-0-8027-7982-3
An earlier invasion of Afghanistan by the British offers some enlightening lessons for American readers in this nicely encapsulated study by a British historian. Troubled by the expansionist vision of Russia in Central Asia and keen to protect the interests of the East India Company, the British crown cooked up a wild scheme to invade Afghanistan in 2098
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15 november 2011
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nonfiction
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1838. The aim was to replace one crackpot dynasty for another, but the occupation went on for two years and raised native insurrection, essentially repelling the British troops and leaving a bitter aftertaste for the inhabitants of the land. Does this scenario sound familiar? Preston (Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima, 2005, etc.) does an admirable job of enlarging the narrow, academic nature of the conflict for more accessible consumption. As a buffer and traditional transit point, the feudal Afghanistan was attractive to invaders from Darius of Persia and Alexander of Macedonia to the 18th-century Persian Nadir Shah, who all crossed the Khyber Pass on their way to sack and subdue India. British precursors to the region had included Mountstuart Elphinstone and his delegation, who had tread gingerly over the disputes between Afghan leaders; and Scottish officer Alexander Burnes, sent by the British on an espionage fact-finding mission to assess the navigability of the Indus in 1831. Burnes reported on the immense trade potential for the British, though the British hardly understood the region’s factionalism. Afghan governor general Lord Auckland issued the famous Simla Manifesto of Oct. 1, 1838, justifying an invasion that was no longer relevant since the Russian-backed Persians were already in retreat. The bewildered British withdrew by 1842, concluding “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close, after suffering and disaster, without much glory attaching either to the government which directed, or the great body of the troops which waged it.” Preston brings this obscure, ill-begotten conflict to a lively, pertinent center stage.
GREEDY BASTARDS How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry Ratigan, Dylan Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-4222-3 978-1-4516-4224-7 e-book
A diatribe against bankers, corrupt politicians, lobbyists, Wall Street traders and others “greedy bastards.” MSNBC host Ratigan takes aim at American citizens who he presumes will no longer tolerate being robbed of their money by those who enrich themselves at the expense of society as a whole. The author explains how the greedy bastards wrested control of the health-care system, the energy-supply pipeline and other sectors, and he preaches that ordinary citizens must become informed—and then enraged—before they are moved to act against those robbing them. Some of Ratigan’s solutions are relatively specific—e.g., he proposes a revision to the tax code that would encourage long-term investment rather than short-term extraction of deposits. Ratigan suggests reforming campaign-finance laws, blocking the revolving door between
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