NY Times Book Review: ‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

April 22, 2013

Books of The Times

Superpower, Leading From Behind

‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

by Michiko Kakutani (04-18-13)

The title of Vali Nasr’s provocative and uneven new book, “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat,” plays on President Bill Clinton’s description of the United States as the world’s one “indispensable nation.” Mr. Nasr — who was a senior adviser to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak) — suggests in this sharply critical volume that the foreign policy pursued under Mr. Obama has diminished America’s leadership role in the world.

To our allies, Mr. Nasr writes, “our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world. In its place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in retreat, most visibly from the one area of the world where it has been most intensely engaged,” the Middle East.

Mr. Nasr does not grapple here with how the Bush administration’s aggressive, pre-emptive policies led the United States into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, and he also fails to provide a convincing and detailed assessment of just how the developments of the Arab Spring might have been more cogently handled by the Obama administration.

What Mr. Nasr’s book, at its best, does do is shed light on the heated infighting within the Obama administration, particularly between the White House and the State Department, adding new details and insights to dynamics previously chronicled in news reports and books like “Little America,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; “The Obamians,” by James Mann; and “Obama’s Wars,” by Bob Woodward.

Mr. Nasr (left) offers his own thoughts about one of the most watched relationships in modern politics, the pas de deux of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama: he asserts that had it not been for Mrs. Clinton’s personal connection with the president and her tenacity, “the State Department would have had no influence on policy making whatsoever.”

He also fleshes out our understanding of the contentious relationship that developed between Mr. Holbrooke and the White House, which was the result of turf wars, philosophical differences, a clash of personalities (the brash, sometimes swashbuckling style of Mr. Holbrooke crashing up against the “no drama” style favored by President Obama and many of his aides) and differing ideas about how to bring the war in Afghanistan to a close.

It was a rivalry, Mr. Chandrasekaran argued in “Little America,” that “sabotaged America’s best chance for a peace deal to end the war” there. Mr. Holbrooke became ill during a meeting in Mrs. Clinton’s office on December 10, 2010, and despite surgery to repair a tear to his aorta, died a few days later.

In this book Mr. Nasr contends that “the White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s video conferences” with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, “and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”

“The White House,” Mr. Nasr says, “resented losing AfPak to the State Department,” and “that was one big reason” it was “on a warpath with Holbrooke — he was in their way and kept the State Department in the mix on an important foreign policy area.” Mr. Holbrooke, he goes on, “would not cede ground to the White House, not when he thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their depth and not up to the job.”

Mr. Nasr describes Mr. Holbrooke (who oversaw the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia) as “a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger.” And he uses his own in-depth knowledge of the geopolitics of the Middle East to make an impassioned case for many of Mr. Holbrooke’s diplomatic initiatives and ideas, which often failed to find traction within the White House.

In these pages Mr. Nasr — who is now dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington — writes about Mr. Holbrooke’s pressing for reconciliation talks with the Taliban early on, when, in Mr. Nasr’s words, “our leverage was at its strongest — when we had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan,” and before troop withdrawal plans were announced.

Mr. Nasr also writes thoughtfully about Mr. Holbrooke’s understanding of the regional dynamics of the Middle East and South Asia. He discusses Mr. Holbrooke (right)’s belief that lasting political solutions could be forged not by military means alone but through a combination of leverage and diplomacy involving all the stakeholders in the region (including countries like Iran and India), and his conviction that such diplomacy included engagement on issues of long-term social and economic interest to individual countries.

The problem with this book is that its genuinely interesting analyses are often undermined by Mr. Nasr’s certainty about matters that are subject to an incalculable number of variables; his vitriolic anger at the Obama White House; and his penchant for making overly broad, sometimes willfully alarmist generalizations.

Mr. Nasr asserts that the president was “very concerned with shielding his right flank so as not to open himself to right-wing criticism,” then goes on to declare that “it is not going too far to say that American foreign policy had become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”

He writes that the administration’s current policy toward Iran (its assumptions and strategy are now “hardly distinguishable,” he says, “from those of the Bush White House”) will “eventually turn Iran into a failed state” that will “pose a new set of security challenges to the region and the United States.” And he argues that the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” policy and what he sees as its neglect and mismanagement of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the unspooling fallout of the Arab Spring are simply pushing that vital region “further into China’s bosom.”

One nightmarish possibility envisioned by Mr. Nasr goes like this: in a couple of decades, “China and Russia will have gobbled up Central Asia, cornered Europe’s energy markets, and planted themselves smack in the middle of the Middle East. They will have emerged as global giants challenging America’s place in the world and perhaps the primacy of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international exchange. And once that happens, it will be all but impossible to reverse. We would then face global threats, threats on a scale we encountered during the cold war, threats that dwarf whatever danger Iran can ever pose.”

Mr. Nasr makes some persuasive arguments for more concerted diplomatic and economic engagement on the part of the United States around the globe, though his observations about America’s essential role on the world stage owe a lot to those set out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his astute 2012 book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.”

When it comes to specifics, Mr. Nasr’s recommendations can sound vague or unrealistic. For instance, he writes that “solving the problems of the Middle East and the threat they pose to the world requires a fundamental change in the region’s economic profile,” and the “international community would have to make a sizable investment — a Marshall Plan in scale — to bring about change of that magnitude.”

He acknowledges that this is problematic, given the economic difficulties America faces today, but in another chapter complains that our settling “for doing so much less” — in Egypt — “than we did after 1989 in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America speaks volumes about our disengagement from the region. If the potential for democracy held by the Arab Spring was not enough to compel our engagement, it is not clear what would be.”

In the end, Mr. Nasr’s eagerness to see virtually every action taken by the Obama administration on foreign policy through as dark a glass as possible distracts attention from his many valid criticisms, and from his thought-provoking assessments of how developments across the Middle East and South Asia today — in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria — are intertwined historically, economically and politically in a fantastically complicated puzzle that has no easy or straightforward solutions.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 19, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: Superpower, Leading From Behind.

Book Review: AB Sulaiman’s Sensitive Truths in Malaysia

April 14, 2013

by S Tayaparan@http://www.malaysiakini.com

‘If at all I am pro-something and anti-another, it is that I am pro-truth and human rationality, and anti-lies and hypocrisy.’- AB Sulaiman

BOOK REVIEW: Critics of AB Sulaiman’s resonant book, ‘Sensitive Truths in Malaysia: A Critical Appraisal of the Malay Problem’ will find much to disagree with. They will lay bare the partisan nature of his writing and hone in on the fact that he disputes the notion of ‘Ketuanan Melayu’ as anything other than an ideological creation meant to unify a disparate community at odds with a changing world and country.

Admirers of this book will find much to agree with. No doubt, they will find comfort in his simpatico thinking normally exhibited by ‘reasonable’ Malays. The term ‘soul searching’ is often described in connection with writings such as these. However, I find another phrase more useful. What AB Sulaiman has done with this book is lay bare his Malay soul.

To be clear, the writer takes great pains to frame his ideas in a universal context, mindful of the fact that ethnicity and culture, is what divides us as Malaysians, so his ‘Malay’ soul is a reference of mine.

At the heart of this book rests the examination of ‘Malay thinking’. Sulaiman approaches this subject as a ‘rationalist’. To quibble over the provocative nature of the term would be pedantic. Suffice to say what he attempts to do is examine the two main foundational elements of Malay identity, which are Islam and ethnicity.

Unlike many other writers who start dissecting this issue from an ‘outsider’ perspective, the writer resolutely deals with the problem, and delves into the numerous problematic issues as an ‘insider’.

Approaching any issue from an insider perspective throws up various intellectual problems. For instance, one could be too sympathetic to the subject and objectivity could be constrained. Alternatively, the observer could mitigate or worse dismiss issues that an outsider perspective would consider germane to the subject in discussion.

Readers can be assured that Sulaiman’s examination suffers from none of this. The writer may approach the intellectual and philosophical foundations in which he bases his discourse on as a ‘layman’ but he is meticulous in defining the terms of his arguments and the thinking behind them.

Best lottery draw

Beginning in the preface where Sulaiman writes, “…the Malay also claim that his society is unique, the only one where all its members are also Muslims. Apparently, not even Arabs who founded Islam can claim this singularity based on an understanding that many Arabs are Christians.

Being Malay and Muslim (thereby a Malay-Muslim) is therefore the best lottery draw any member of the human race could ever wish for” – the writer begins his and our journey deep into the meaning of what it means to be ‘Malay’ from a personal and constitutional viewpoint.

And in examining the consequence of winning the best lottery draw, the writer turns his curious mind on the arduous task of defining philosophical (Western) and spiritual (Islamic) components in the cultural dissonance within the Malay community.

Sulaiman uses history as a context to explore the evolving cultural mindset of his majority community. Readers are cautioned that those expecting knee-jerk liberal platitudes would be sorely disappointed.

In a nuanced tone, Sulaiman explores the issue of identity and culture, which shaped the Malay community throughout the decades. His conclusion that the reactionary forces within the Malay community hold sway for political and social reasons is arrived at with painstaking research and a empathic understanding of the variables at play.

A fascinating aspect of this book and perhaps unusual in a book concerning itself with religion specifically Islam, is that the author references popular culture as a means to humanise and transmit his rather philosophical questions.

An example of this would be when in the chapter on religion, in which the writer attempts to define the commonality of various religions as a means of transmitting the idea of “universality”, Sulaiman references the noted atheist polemist Richard Dawkins.

This example underscored two points. The first, is that the author is curious enough not to discard arguments which would seem anathema to his own religious viewpoint but more importantly, the second point, that the author is an example of how a Muslim is not so easily swayed from their professed religion.

Depending on your partisan bent, certain readers would be appalled by the ‘progressive’ leanings of this author. However by no means is this book a definite tome on the inner workings of the Malay mind and should not be read as such.

Reigniting a dormant discourse

This book is one in a long line of subaltern narratives that seeks to transmit the idea of a polychromatic Malay discourse that has been deliberately hidden by establishment forces seeking conformity at any cost.

What we need to understand is that the real aim of this book is to reignite a long dormant discourse that if allowed to flourish will only enrich the Malay community. There are many ideas contained in this book that could, nay, should be challenged.

What this book should evoke is not hostility but the same curiosity that the author has and willingness to articulate ideas that could lead many other Malays to join in the discourse offering different perspectives of their own.

This book is a personal journey into what it means to be Malay in the changing face of Malaysia. It is a courageous exploration of a community at odds with itself and Islam but ultimately a hopeful sensitive narrative of coming to terms with the quixotic dream of a Malaysian identity.

The profound beauty of this book is that the author stares into the mirror as a Malay and discovers a multiracial face looking back at him. In the end, what non-Malay readers should take away from this book is the idea that sensitive truths do not reside in the ‘other’ but in each of our own communities. AB Sulaiman has taken the first tentative step in reminding us of this fact.

The Messenger and the Message

April 10, 2013

‘The First Muslim,’ by Lesley Hazleton

by Hari Kunzru (04-05-13)

In today’s febrile cultural and religious climate, what project could be more fraught than writing a biography of Muhammad? The worldwide protests at “The Innocence of Muslims,” 14 minutes of trashy provocation posted on YouTube, are a terrible reminder to the would-be biographer that the life story of the prophet of Islam is not material about which one is free to have a “take.”

Lesley Hazleton’s “First Muslim” is a book written by a white woman of dual American and British citizenship, published in America more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. For many believers it is already — even before it is read, if it is read at all — an object of suspicion, something to be defended against, in case it should turn out to be yet another insult, another cruel parody of a story such an author has no business telling.

To others, of course, this book offers a welcome chance to read that life story in a more familiar and accessible form than the Islamic sources, a window into the parallel world where it is worth killing and dying to preserve the Prophet’s aura of holiness. Bigots looking to confirm their prejudices will, by and large, find “The First Muslim” a disappointment: Hazleton approaches her subject with scrupulous respect.

She blogs as “the Accidental Theologist,” where she describes herself as “a psychologist by training, a Middle East reporter by experience, an agnostic fascinated by the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect.” In 2010, she gave a TED talk debunking some of the more egregious myths about the Koran, notably the salaciously Orientalist “72 virgins.” This is a writer who is working to dispel contradictions, not sharpen them.

Where does this leave the reviewer? Embroiled, unfortunately. A few days after I was assigned this book, the Darul Uloom in Deoband, a conservative Islamic seminary, called for me to be barred from speaking at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. At last year’s event I read an excerpt from “The Satanic Verses,” still banned in India, to protest the death threat that had forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his scheduled appearance.

I was one of four authors who gave such readings. Lawyers and festival organizers advised us to leave town (and in my case India) immediately. Seven police complaints were subsequently brought against us under Indian laws protecting religious feelings from offense. Since I have, as another Muslim group put it in their own press statement, “hurt the sentiments of the community,” some people will find my judgment of this book a priori worthless, or at least suspect. Reader, beware.

The story of Muhammad is undoubtedly extraordinary. Orphaned in childhood in Mecca, an Arabian trading hub, he rose to be the trusted business agent and later husband of Khadija, a wealthy merchant woman. This respectable citizen took to climbing into the mountains overlooking the town, where he would spend nights in solitary meditation. Eventually he received a revelation, in the form of the voice of the angel Gabriel, who began to dictate the verses of the Koran.

As the messenger of this radical new form of monotheism, he disrupted the power structure and eventually led his followers out of Mecca to nearby Medina, where he took full political control and began military operations against the rulers of his birthplace. By the time of his death, Islam had been embraced throughout the Arabian Peninsula and was spreading farther afield.

“The First Muslim” tells this story with a sort of jaunty immediacy. Bardic competitions are “the sixth-century equivalent of poetry slams.” The section of the Koran known as the Sura of the Morning has “an almost environmentalist approach to the natural world.” Theological ideas and literary tropes are “memes” that can go “viral.” Readers irritated by such straining for a contemporary tone will find it offset by much useful and fascinating context on everything from the economics of the Meccan caravan trade to the pre-Islamic lineage of prophets called hanifs, who promoted monotheism and rejected idolatry.

In the terms it sets itself, “The First Muslim” succeeds. It makes its subject vivid and immediate. It deserves to find readers. However, its terms are those of the popular biography, and this creates a tension the book never quite resolves.

Though based on scholarship, it is not a scholarly work. Factual material from eighth- and ninth-century histories is freely mixed with speculation about Muhammad’s motives and emotions intended to allow the reader, in the quasi-therapeutic vocabulary that is the default register of so much mainstream contemporary writing, to “empathize” or better still, “identify with” him. Inevitably, a forest of conditionals surrounds such speculation, as Hazleton tries to intuit what Muhammad “must have felt” or “surely would have” done.

“For an adolescent trying to cement a life from the shards of loss and displacement,” we are told, “the monotheistic idea has to have been immensely powerful.” One might equally be justified in saying that animism would have made him feel less alone. Elsewhere we are invited to appreciate “the sheer humanness” of his terrified reaction to the Koranic revelation.

Occasionally a novelistic impulse takes over, as in a passage describing a flash flood where “you” “flail and fall” and try to pick yourself up because “the roar of it is on you now.” Has Hazleton been in such a flood? Is she paraphrasing someone else’s account? This is innocent enough as an exercise in style, but it makes one uncertain about the status of more substantial passages.

Muhammad’s transition from humble messenger to political leader, and from peaceful preacher to war leader, forms the substance of the story. The factional struggles, political assassinations, night flights and pitched battles that surround it are reminiscent of the experience of another prophet, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith, as is the role of revelation in exonerating sexual impropriety — in Muhammad’s case to allay suspicions of infidelity surrounding his third wife, Aisha.

Despite the orthodox Muslim insistence that Muhammad, while possessed of human failings, is irreproachable, some of his actions are deeply troubling. Even Hazleton finds it hard to put a positive spin on the mass beheading of up to 900 surrendered men of the Jewish Qurayza tribe, losers in one round of the factional battles for control of Medina.

However accurate her book, however laudable her intention to bridge the chasm between believers and unbelievers, Hazleton still has to confront the question of the authenticity of religious revelation. Respect is not the same as belief: her interpretation of “whatever happened up there on Mount Hira” is to stress Muhammad’s “experience” of revelation while sidestepping its objective existence. In various places, she hints that the Koran and the Hadith, like other holy books, have a textual history and that certain events in the life of Muhammad are best considered tropes.

A fuller examination of these points would have been fascinating, but it would have forced her to embrace the perilous notion that the Koran, instead of being the revealed word of God, might be a text like any other. In evading such material Hazleton clearly hopes to avoid giving offense, but try as she might, she cannot escape the fact that in our time even a well-meaning and fundamentally decent book such as this can never be innocent, because it cannot stand outside our violent recent history.

Hari Kunzru’s most recent novel is “Gods Without Men.”

A version of this review appeared in print on April 7, 2013, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Messenger and the Message.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/the-first-muslim-by-lesley-hazleton.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

‘Out of Order,’ by Sandra Day O’Connor

April 1, 2013

Summary Judgment

‘Out of Order,’ by Sandra Day O’Connor

by Adam Liptak (03-29-13)

Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court in 2006, but she still turns up for the occasional argument, sitting off to the side in one of the seats reserved for important guests. She can look a little grim, and with reason. The court has been busy disassembling her work.

In its 2010 decision in Citizens United, for instance, the court struck down limits on political spending by corporations and unions, overturning a 2003 decision that had been one of O’Connor’s major achievements. “Gosh,” she said a few days later, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

O’Connor is 83, but she still hears cases in the federal appeals courts. In her frequent public appearances, she talks about her service as the first woman on the Supreme Court, encourages students to learn about their government and worries about the consequences of the distinctively American practice of electing judges.

She has a lot to say. But, the provocative title of her new book notwithstanding, she is not saying it here. Instead, she has delivered a disjointed collection of anodyne anecdotes and bar-association bromides about the history of the Supreme Court. “Out of Order” is a gift shop bauble, and its title might as well refer to how disorganized and meandering it is.

This is particularly disappointing in light of the recent string of quite good books from other justices. Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer have published competing accounts of their judicial philosophies; Sonia Sotomayor a vivid and moving memoir; and John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, a candid account of his 35 years on the court.

O’Connor says she wrote the book in response to requests from “people across the country and across the world for my ‘insider’ perspective on the court and its goings-on.” What she has given them is institutional hagiography.

The book is short and padded. The main part, only 165 pages long, is interrupted by stock photographs and curious, unexplained editorial cartoons. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are included in an appendix. They are surely worth rereading from time to time, but their main purpose here seems to be to add some bulk to a very skimpy effort.

The illustrations are particularly infuriating markers of missed opportunities. In one cartoon from 1981, the year O’Connor joined the court, the Rev. Jerry Falwell is seen on his knees, praying and crying, as she swings in what looks like one of the scales of justice. He is not mentioned in the text, and the reader is left to guess at what he is so worked up about. That he wants O’Connor to vote to strike down Roe v. Wade? (She was, as it turned out, an author of a 1992 joint opinion reaffirming its core, also not discussed in the book.)

There is, similarly, a courtroom artist’s sketch of the argument in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in admissions decisions at public universities. Grutter is very likely to be weakened or reversed before the end of the current term in June. But the picture just floats there, unmoored to the text, which does not mention O’Connor’s majority opinion in the case.

O’Connor is fond of the stock phrase and profligate with the exclamation point. She will tell you the same story twice. And she will recount a joke but withhold its meaning. We hear that the court works “in an atmosphere insulated as far as possible from political pressures” and then, some 60 pages later, that it works “in an atmosphere insulated, as far as possible, from political pressures.” Same phrase — but now with commas. We are told three times that Justice John Rutledge resigned from the Supreme Court in order to become Chief Justice of South Carolina.

On Page 26, Justice O’Connor lists the original members of the Supreme Court, noting that Robert Hanson Harrison “resigned soon after his confirmation as an associate justice to become chancellor of Maryland, an important judicial post.” She repeats the list on Page 52, but now “Justice Harrison resigned for health reasons before the first session even took place!”

A more careful editor would have saved the author from these fumbles. But O’Connor herself is to blame for missing the point of some of her own stories. In one, she quotes from an internal memo that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist sent to his colleagues about a draft opinion in a 1991 decision upholding a ban on nude dancing. “Accentuate the positive,” Rehnquist wrote, reciting the lyrics to a Johnny Mercer song. “Eliminate the negative / Latch on to the affirmative / Don’t mess with Mr. In Between.”

The memo demonstrated, O’Connor writes, Rehnquist’s “penchant for music.” But what it really showed, as scholars and journalists noted when the memo emerged in the papers of Justice Thurgood Marshall and as John A. Jenkins wrote in his recent biography of Rehnquist, was a lighthearted acknowledgment that the opinion could not be reconciled with First Amendment precedents.

The larger problem is not that Justice O’Connor’s little sketches and lessons are wrong. Quite the contrary. The problem is that they are empty. She writes, correctly, that “the court’s only weapon is its moral authority.” But she refuses to give this and similar sentiments substance.

In retirement, she writes, she has “taken up the cause of promoting civics education in our nation’s schools.” But civics are just a skeleton. They need the flesh of argument to come to life, to have bite, to matter.

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The Times.

A version of this review appeared in print on March 31, 2013, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Summary Judgment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/books/review/out-of-order-by-sandra-day-oconnor.html?ref=books&_r=0

A New Concert of Nations

March 26, 2013

In 1990, a billion people earned enough income to consider making discretionary purchases. By 2010, the figure had more than doubled.

by Tom Nagorski (03-19-13)@http://online.wsj.com

The Indian scholar Brahma Challaney recently gave a talk at the Asia Society in New York about the coming global water-supply crisis. It was a dispiriting forecast: drought and pollution, even wars over water. That same morning brought dreary news from other fronts: a fresh threat from North Korea, another atrocity in Syria, a frightening smog alert from Beijing.

Anyone feeling the weight of the world’s woes will be grateful for Kishore Mahbubani’s “The Great Convergence,” a sweeping survey that proves to be, in large measure, a counterweight to global gloom and doom. Mr. Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, is under no illusions about the troubles we face, but he takes the longer view, reaching back a few decades to see an upward trend and to marvel at how far we have come.

Under Mr. Mahbubani’s lens, we see a plunge in the rates of extreme poverty and early-childhood deaths; a rise in literacy; a drop in the number of armed conflicts. “Major interstate wars,” says Mr. Mahbubani, “have become a sunset industry.” The good-news numbers are remarkable. In 1990, one billion human beings earned enough income to consider making discretionary purchases beyond mere necessity; by 2010, the figure had more than doubled. Mr. Mahbubani has lived this change. He was raised, he says, in “a typical third world city . . . [with] no flush toilets, some malnutrition, ethnic riots and, most importantly of all, no sense of hope for the future.” The city was Singapore, today an economic juggernaut with a per-capita income that outranks America’s.

Such statistics are presented as evidence of a “great convergence,” a phrase that Mr. Mahbubani first spotted in a Financial Times column by Martin Wolf, in which the columnist was describing a convergence of global interests, values and economic fortunes. Of course, nothing says “convergence” like the rush to connectivity, and while we know this story well, Mr. Mahbubani’s treatment still startles: Eleven million cellphone subscriptions, world-wide, in 1990; 5½ billion today. In 1985 the world’s fastest computer, the Cray 2, the size of a washing machine, was prohibitively expensive and required coolants to avoid overheating. Today the Cray 2′s match is the iPad 2, and it runs on 10 watts of power.

The Great Convergence

By Kishore Mahbubani
(PublicAffairs, 315 pages, $26.99)

Mr. Mahbubani is a big-picture writer and thinker, a Thomas Friedman with a strong Asian perspective, and like Mr. Friedman he is inclined toward the aphorism or analogy. When he eventually leaves his world-is-improving narrative to fret about future geopolitics, he does so with a maritime metaphor: “People no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats. Instead they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive responsibility for one cabin. However, it has no captain or crew to take care of the boat as a whole.”

This passage sounds Mr. Mahbubani’s second theme: If we are gaining ground and converging in inspiring ways, we still lack an effective architecture for global governance. The need is critical, Mr. Mahbubani believes, because that metaphorical boat may soon run into an iceberg. The new arrivals in the Asian middle class, for example, will expect the trappings of success: a car, a refrigerator and so on, and our planet won’t be able to support them. For Mr. Mahbubani, the answer is some kind of global stewardship, one especially concerned with the environment, the economy and security. In short, we need a global referee.

But how to get there? Mr. Mahbubani skewers existing structures—the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the G-20—as either ineffectual or beholden to the great powers. The largest carbon emitters, to take a favorite example, have rejected global protocols (the U.S.) or signed them and pursued a “development first” strategy (China and India). It’s hard to argue with Mr. Mahbubani on that point but also hard to see how a new global architecture is possible when the great powers aren’t interested.

One great power, of course, is particularly uninterested, and in these pages Mr. Mahbubani casts the U.S. as an arrogant actor, a hegemon with no patience for multilateralism. Here his argument weakens from overreach. America’s frustration with the U.N. is not, as he argues, merely a matter of self-interest; it is also rooted in real concerns about mismanagement and certain U.N. policies.

As for Mr. Mahbubani’s charge that the U.N. acts only “when the residents of Park Avenue” (his phrase for the five permanent members of the Security Council) are affected, that just isn’t so. We have seen U.N. interventions in Somalia, Kosovo and Libya, none of which was exactly a “Park Avenue” interest.

But Mr. Mahbubani has a good idea for reforming the Security Council itself (a kind of staggered, tiers-of-influence plan), and he has good questions for Americans. Are we ready to accept being “No. 2″ on the global stage, at least by certain metrics? In fewer than five years China’s share of global income (only 2% two decades ago) will surpass that of the U.S., and yet the political discourse in America suggests an unwillingness to face that outcome, let alone plan for it. “The West will not lose power,” Mr. Mahbubani writes. “It will have to share power.”

In the end, he remains hopeful because he really believes it’s the long view that matters. If Southeast Asia—a war-torn, poverty-riven corner of the globe only a half-century ago—is today a region of peace and prosperity, then, Mr. Mahbubani believes, much else is possible. “In this rapidly changing world of ours,” he writes, “. . . miracles can happen.”

Mr. Nagorski is Executive Vice President of the Asia Society and the author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”

A version of this article appeared March 20, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A New Concert Of Nations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324590904578288022370871376.html

THE BORDERS/IRSHAD MANJI BOOK CASE: SENSE AND SENSIBILITY PREVAILED!

March 22,2013

by Din Merican

I have become friends with Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz, the poor Malay Borders Bookstore

manager who, on  May 30, 2012, was charged with much fanfare in the Syariah Court for purportedly distributing anti-Islam books. The book in question was by a Canadian writer Irshad Manji titled “Allah Liberty and Love”.

That immediately made Nik Raina an enemy of Islam. In Malaysia, nobody wants to be an enemy of Islam. It did not matter that Nik had not read the book nor understood what it is about. It did not matter that she was a mere employee and had no control over the books sold in the Borders Bookstore. It did not matter that nobody knew that the book was against Islam. It did not matter that nobody knew about any ban on the book, because it was not banned at that time.

Once the Jabatan Agama, in this case Jabatan Agama Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI), charged her in the Syariah Court, she became Islam’s No.1 Enemy. That was what happened to Nik Raina since May 2012 until this morning when I received the good news that Borders Bookstore, Stephen Fung and Nik Raina have been vindicated by High Court Judge Dato’ Zaleha Yusuf. News spread very fast that Judge Zaleha had chastised JAWI for displaying religious madness in their action against Borders, Stephen and Nik Raina.

Nik Raina and her lawyer, En. Rosli Dahlan

Immediately I was impressed because I have seen this judge. Dato’ Zaleha wears the tudung. This must be one brave Malay lady tudung Judge to vindicate the enemies of Islam in her court of law.

More than that, she dared to chastise JAWI and two Ministers namely the Home Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, and the Agama Minister, Jamil Khir Baharom for not correcting JAWI. But why was this judge so brave to vindicate people branded by JAWI as the enemies of Islam? And why vindicate? For what? What wrong have they done? So, let’s understand the facts a bit.

Apparently, some time before the incident, JAWI and Islamic scholars from JAKIM had reviewed the Irshad Manji book and prepared a thick report counting out 1001 reasons why Irshad Manji is an enemy of Islam and thus all her writings are blasphemous. If JAWI had their way they would burn Irshad Manji on the stake and make her books a bonfire.

Anyway, JAWI then approached the Minister of Home Affairs to ban the book because under the Printing and Presses Act, only the Home Minister can ban books. For some reason, the Home Minister slept on it like how he slept on the job when more than 100 Filipino terrorists took over Lahad Datu.

In Lahad Datu, the Home Minister justified the continued presence of these terrorists on Malaysian soil by saying that they are harmless toothless sarong clad old men, that is, until our security forces men were brutally killed and mutilated. In the end, we had to call on jet fighters and the army to bomb the three villages to get rid of these harmless toothless old men.

The inaction of Home minister Hishamuddin Hussein in this case is almost similar to his late action  to table a white paper on the Lahad Datu episode. It should have been done during the early stage of intrusion. The matter has prolonged long enough and many security personnel had lost their lives. The people had also waited too long for answers, but in the end they were disappointed as none had been forthcoming.

So, JAWI being irritated with the inaction by the Home Minister decided to take things into their own hands and orchestrated a dramatic raid on Borders Bookstore at the Gardens Mid Valley Mall. Just like the siege of Bahgdad when the Mongolian horde stormed a Muslim city, the JAWI commandos stormed Borders Bookstore with a horde of photographers and reporters as if it was a fortress of anti-Islam books. Like in a Jihad (Holy War), JAWI needed to capture some POWs (Prisoners of War), otherwise it would not be a successful war campaign.

But JAWI had a problem because Borders is owned by a company, Berjaya, and they dare not arrest the owners of Borders because that would be Tan Sri Vincent Tan. So they went after the General Manager who is Stephen Fung. Again, that was a problem because Stephen is a Christian and JAWI has no powers over non-Muslims. So, JAWI went down the chain of command and to their delight found that the store manager is a Muslim. So that’s how Nik Raina got embroiled.

But that was not the end of JAWI’s problem. After interviewing Nik Raina, JAWI discovered that Nik Raina had neither power over nor knowledge about the book. You see, at that time JAWI had not announced to the public of the findings of their thick report that the book is anti-Islam because that report was official secret meant only for the eyes of the Home Minister. And the Home Minister had forgotten to gazette a ban on the book as anti-Islam. So, on the day of the raid and Nik Raina’s arrest, nobody knew that the book was banned. But JAWI didn’t care. JAWI was in a rush to announce the success of their raid, so they needed to charge someone, anyone. JAWI refused to listen to reason and even refused legal representation to Nik Raina. So that’s why Nik Raina was charged, because it was convenient to do so.

But JAWI underestimated that Berjaya is now under a new leadership, Dato Robin Tan. Robin Tan may be Vincent Tan’s son, but he is a man of the brave new world and could not stand to see his company and his employees being bullied and kicked around. Also, Borders’ COO is a feisty Australian trained lawyer, Yau Su Peng. So, between them, they decided to look around for a lawyer who is qualified to appear in the Syariah Courts and the Civil Courts; who will not be cowed to appear against the bullying and intimidating tactics of the Ketua Pendakwa Syarie; a lawyer who is not afraid of the establishment. Enter my young friend, Lawyer Rosli Dahlan!

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

To give support to Nik Raina, my wife and I have attended the court sessions in the Syariah Courts and the Civil Courts. I have seen how committed and passionate Rosli is in defending Nik Raina. I have heard him articulating why JAWI’s action was misguided and the madness of JAWI and the Ketua Pendakwa Syarie in pursuing the matter. I have heard him imploring the Civil Courts not to be intimidated by the Syariah authorities and persuading them not to abdicate their constitutional duty.

Thus, I was most happy today that Judge Dato Zaleha was moved by Rosli’s closing Submissions that JAWI’s actions set a dangerous precedent that any state religious body can simply deem a publication to be contrary to hukum syarak without the public being aware of it. And that was what that had stirred controversy, created a conflict of laws situation and gave Malaysia unnecessary international acclaim for illogical religious enforcement action.

From my sources in Borders, I have obtained a copy of Rosli’s Submission in which he implored the Judge “to reinstate reason into this already tumultuous situation so that some sense and sensibility can prevail to calm our multi-racial and multi-religious Malaysian society which has been disturbed by an unwarranted fear stirred by JAWI and the lack of moral courage and political will by the Minister of KDN and Minister Agama to correct the obvious wrongs committed by JAWI.”

I salute Tudung Judge Dato’ Zaleha for her moral courage in making this bold Judgment. More than that, Malaysians now can have more confidence in the new Judiciary where Judges are not afraid to restore sense and sensibility which is much needed in our government’s administration!

_____________

DECISION FOR JUDICIAL REVIEW APPLICATION: KUALA LUMPUR HIGH COURT CIVIL NO. R2-25-137-06/2012

Brief Grounds by Yang Arif Dato’ Zaleha Binti Yusof on 22.02.2013, 9:37 a.m.:

“This is going to be the gist of my decision.

This case involves the review of the Respondents’ action in raiding and searching the premises of the 1st Applicant and seizing publication therein and examining the Applicants and subsequently arresting and prosecuting the 3rd Applicant.

The Respondents here are public authorities and the Applicants are aggrieved and have been already affected by the Respondents’ action. Hence, this Court is of the opinion that this Court has a supervisory jurisdiction over the decision and acts of these bodies. This application also involves the interpretation of law that relates to fundamental liberties thus it is clear to me that the Applicants are entitled to file this application under Order 53 of the Rules of Court and this Court has jurisdiction to hear it. To me the question of this Court encroaching into the jurisdiction of the Syariah Court does not arise as it is the Civil Court that has jurisdiction to review.

Well the actions of the Respondents affect the Applicants who are a company, a non-Muslim and a Muslim respectively. Section 1 subsection (2) of Syariah Offences Act clearly provides that the Act shall apply to persons professing the religion of Islam and corporation is not included in the definition of Muslim under the Syariah Administration Act.

As submitted by the learned counsel for the Applicants, the High Court in Potensi Bernas Sdn Bhd v. Datuk Badaruddin Datuk Mustapha had decided that Syariah Court has no jurisdiction over a non-muslim and that a company being a creature of the statute does not profess any religion. Similary in Latifah Mat Zin v. Rosmawati Sharibun & Anor, the Federal Court had held that an application to the Syariah Court can only be made if both parties are Muslim. Since the Syariah law is only applicable to Muslim therefore the actions taken by the 1st Respondent against the 1st and 2nd Applicants in my opinion were clearly illegal.

On action against the 3rd Applicant, no doubt she is a Muslim, however does that alone justify the 1st Respondent’s action against her? She is a merely a Store Manager and the person who is responsible for the collection of titles and range of stock of books and publications displayed and sold in the 1st Applicant’s Bookstore is the 2nd Applicant and not her, and this has not been disputed.

 Matters pertaining to publication, printing and printing presses fall within item 21, List I of the Ninth Schedule read together with Article 74 of the Federal Constitution. If we look at item 1 of List II of the Ninth Schedule, the State is given power to create and punish offences by persons professing the religion of Islam against precepts of Islam except in regards to matters included in the Federal List. No doubt the creation of punishment of offences against the precepts of Islam can be enacted by the State Legislature. However clear reading of Item 1 of List II of the Ninth Schedule as I mentioned just now shows that the State cannot enact laws in regards to matters included in the Federal List. Since matters pertaining to publication, printing and printing presses fall within List I ie. The Federal List, the validity of section 13 of the Syariah Offences Act is questionable as it is ultra vires the Printing Act and the Federal Constitution. Even if it is a valid law what amounts to contrary to Islamic Law is also questionable as it is too wide. Members of the public must be made known what publication is contrary to Islamic Law or precepts of Islam. Otherwise as the Learned Counsel for the Applicants have submitted, a Muslim employee who works in a bookstore that also sells Christianity Bible, books on Buddhism or Hinduism or any other religion besides other books which as we know now they are many such bookstore would be committing an offence. Hence there need to be notification by the Respondents as to what books and publication are contrary to Islamic Law.

It must be noted that at the material time the publications or books in question was not subject to any Prohibition Order by KDN. The Prosecution Order was only issued 3 weeks after the raid. Bear in mind the provision of Article 7 of Federal Constitution which provides that no person shall be punishable for an act or omission which was not punishable by law when it was done or made.

Section 13 of the Syariah Offences Act must be in conformity with the Federal Constitution especially the said Article 7. The Court of Appeal in Multi-Purpose Holdings Berhad v. Ketua Pengarah Hasil Dalam Negeri the Parliament does not intend its act to violate the Constitution. Hence, a statute must be read harmoniously with the Constitution to avoid any conflict between them which will result in the statute becoming void. Adopting that approach, the Act must, in my judgment be read prospectively to prevent the appellant in that case and those similarly circumstanced from becoming retrospectively criminally liable. Applying that principle I am of the opinion that the criminal charge against the 3rd Applicant in the Syariah High Court is an infringement of Article 7. Further there is nothing in the Syariah Offences Act which provide for any State Religious Body to prohibit any publication. It only creates an offence to publication. As submitted both by the Respondents and Applicants, whenever there is a conflict between a law enacted by the Parliament and a law enacted by the State Legislature, the Court has to follow and adopt a harmonious interpretation of the law. The only logical approach is for Section 7 of the Printing Act to support Section 13 of the Syariah Offences Act ie. notification to the public first, then only the enforcement action.

We live in multi-religious and multi-racial society, such approach would be harmonious and avoid any tension, controversy and conflict into the society and law.

To conclude, I agree with the submission of the Applicants and therefore allow this Application in Prayer (a) to (i) of Enclosure 6.”

“No order as to costs.”

Lee Kuan Yew, Grand Master of Asia

March 16, 2013

by Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill -March 1, 2013

On his desk in the Oval Office, President John F. Kennedy kept a small plaque that reminded him of the vicissitudes of life, even for the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. It read: “Oh God, my boat is so small and thy ocean so large.” In the turbulent sea in which statesmen, corporate leaders, investors, and the rest of us are trying to get our bearings in international affairs today, where can one find wise coordinates?

In thinking about the rise of China, the stumbling of the United States, the potential of India, or the claim that the twenty-first century will belong to Asia, whom should we look to for insight about this uncertain future? Among the seven billion inhabitants of planet Earth today, only one has created a modern Asian city-state whose nearly six million inhabitants now enjoy higher levels of income than Americans. Only one individual has been called “mentor” by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who initiated China’s march to the market, and its new leader Xi Jinping. Only one individual has been called upon for counsel about these developments by every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. That individual is Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore.

Over the past 18 months, we have been privileged to engage Lee Kuan Yew in a series of interviews and conversations about these issues. Having listened, reviewed what he has written and said in other settings, and then returned to follow up, we have been able to drill down in ways that capture many of his most penetrating strategic insights.

As they have embraced the magic of Adam Smith’s marketplace, Asian economies have grown at unprecedented rates. In a nation of 1.3 billion, China has raised more than 600 million people out of conditions of abject poverty and created a rapidly expanding middle class already larger than the entire population of the United States. On its current trajectory, for the first time in history, millions of individuals will experience a one-hundred-fold increase in their standard of living in a single lifetime. In Europe, that took one thousand years.

After three decades of double-digit growth, an economy that was smaller than Spain’s in 1980 now ranks second in the world and will become number one in the next decade. Do China’s leaders intend to displace the United States as the predominant power in Asia in the foreseeable future? Lee Kuan Yew answers: “Of course. Why not? Their reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.”

Will a China that has risen to become the world’s largest economy follow the path chosen by Japan and Germany, accepting its place within the postwar order created by the United States? Lee says decidedly not. “It is China’s intention to become the greatest power in the world—and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the west.”

Nevertheless, Western ideals of individuals’ basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have become part of the mental geography of China’s “golden billion,” who are becoming increasingly part of the world outside China.

Lee thinks this bodes well for the future of the Asia-Pacific: “peace and security in the region will turn on whether China emerges as a xenophobic, chauvinistic force, bitter and hostile to the West, or educated and involved in the ways of the world, more cosmopolitan, more internationalized and outward looking.”

Will India rival or even surpass China’s rise? The U.S. government recently asked its $50 billion intelligence community this question. Their recently released report, Global Trends 2030, forecasts that “the most rapid growth of the middle class will occur in Asia, with India somewhat ahead of China in the long term.” Lee Kuan Yew disagrees strongly.

As he puts it, provocatively: “When Nehru was in charge, I thought India showed promise of becoming a thriving society and a great power,” but it has not “because of its stifling bureaucracy” and its “rigid caste system.” Being deliberately provocative, Lee says: “India is not a real country. Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.”

In the competition between East and West, he expects Asia to overshadow the Euro-Atlantic powers. The principal reasons why have more to do with culture than with numbers. In his view, “Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government. In the East, we start with self-reliance.”

No one will agree with all of Lee’s views. No one, however, can fail to be challenged by his direct, pithy answers, or to be enlightened by his insights. For navigating in the buzzing, booming confusion of international affairs today, the strategic grand master is a source of wise coordinates.

Graham Allison is director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Robert D. Blackwill is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are coauthors of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World, published Feb. 1 by MIT Press).

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/lee-kuan-yew-grand-master-asia-8169

Book Review: The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World by Kishore Mahbubani

March 12, 2013

by Nathan Gardels

The rise of Asia is the single most important historical development of our era. Yet, for all its now well-established might, few voices from the region have stepped forward to address what role Asia, and above all China, must play in shaping Globalization 2.0 — the interdependence of plural identities that now characterizes our world.

Grand Western strategists like Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski get the new reality, but have not yet gone so far as to envision in any specific way just how the West and China will share power in the region, let alone the world.

The Chinese scholar Yan Xuetong has mused in his book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power  how interstate relations in the spring and autumn and Warring States period in pre-Qin China 2,000 years ago might be reflected today. He argues for the “power of example” over the “example of power” approach of hegemony or tyranny in the relation between states, but says little about how China, which has never been a world player but only a regional one, might take on a more central role in the extant global institutions of governance that have kept the peace and fostered prosperity since the end of World War II.

Zheng Bijian, the eminence of China’s strategic thinkers and author of the “peaceful rise” doctrine, has lately articulated the more engaging concept of “building on a convergence of interests to create a community of interests.” But his focus is really on how to beneficially guide Chinese national interest in a changing world more than on what role China should play in shaping the institutions of world order itself.

In his new book, The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World, Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, at last rises to the challenge. In a way, it is no surprise that a former UN Ambassador from one of the smallest countries in Asia has the largest vision. Singapore — probably the most global state anywhere — has thrived by its wits navigating the ever-shifting rapids of globalization.

Mahbubani’s magnum opus is so far the most comprehensive and objective proposal out there to update the world institutions — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods organizations like the IMF and World Bank, the WTO — by accommodating them to the rise of the rest. Indeed, he evinces more faith in those institutions than in their Western founders who, as he acidly notes, are starting to see their own creation as a disadvantage now that power is shifting away from their control.

With characteristic Asian pragmatism, Mahbubani’s essential argument is not for the creation of new institutions that enshrine the global powershift, but rather closing the “democratic deficit” by filling up the old bottle of the West’s rule-based system with the new wine of the rising rest. For Mahbubani, the old institutions should remain, but under new management. In a departure from his trademark agitating manner, what makes Mahbubani’s proposals so provocative is their very moderation.

Indeed, by Mahbubani’s lights, the greatest paradox of the present historical moment is that the “common norms” that have made Asia successful and are the basis of “the logic of one world” have been adapted from the West. In this, the long-time apostle of non-Western modernity arrives at the mirror image conclusions of historian Niall Ferguson, the long-time champion of the virtues of Western imperialism.

Mahbubani’s “common norms” more or less overlap with Ferguson’s famous “killer apps” of modernization that Ferguson sees as becoming more robustly embraced these days in the East than the West. Neither could be further from Sam Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The “common norms” for Mahbubani are modern science and logical reasoning, free-market economics, a social contract that accountably binds ruler and ruled, and multilateralism. Ferguson’s six killer apps are: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society and the work ethic.

Both avoid the loaded term “democracy” as a norm or an application. For Ferguson, “competition” would seem to encompass not only multi-party contests, but also meritocratic performance competition within one party, as in China. For Mahbubani, the West was the first to leap ahead by destroying feudalism, but democracy is not yet universally shared. In China, he nonetheless sees a kind of systemic accountability of the Party to the masses since it must “earn its legitimacy daily” through performance.

It is in this interstice that separates values from norms and apps where the rub lies. The challenge is precisely how to establish effective institutions of governance based on common interests — or even “one logic” — but not preceded by a common identity rooted in a common value system.

For Mahbubani, employing the “one logic” of common norms that we all share as an operating system is sufficient to sustain a rules-based system.This, however, implies tilting toward the geo-civilizational worldview of the East, in which incommensurate values coexist in one world with many systems. That contrasts with the stubborn geo-political worldview of the West, which sees territories and ideologies as either won or lost.

Mahbubani is not naïve. He exhaustively inventories the geopolitical stumbling blocks that can throw a wrench into his optimism (e.g. China vs. India, sea lanes between Japan and China, an Iranian nuclear detonation, etc). At the same time, his trust in the allegiance to a rules-based system in the West from whence it emanated seems to me grounded in a time warp.

Indeed, the greatest stumbling block from my point of view is how the democratization of global institutions he proposes will be frustrated by the democratic publics of the West. It’s democratization vs. democracy.

First, these publics are turning ever more inward to protect themselves from the withering gales of competition the post-WWII system has unleashed. We see this not only with the China-bashing in the U.S. We also see how difficult it is for democratic European states to make the tough reforms necessary to maintain the competitiveness required to finance their generous welfare state in the face of the double challenge of demographic demise and the rise of the rest.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has put the issue squarely: Europe is 7 percent of the world population, produces 25 percent of global product and accounts for 50 percent of social spending. That will be tough to maintain as Europe’s proportion of global production shrinks. Today, the continent is paralyzed by this prospect.

Second, and most importantly, the UN and the Bretton Woods system were put in place after World War II, when the democratic American public still trusted its elites enough to agree to delegate power to institutions that would benefit all. That trust in the “best and brightest” was shattered by the Vietnam war, trampled during the counter-culture sixties, de-legitimated during the Reagan and New Right war on government and finally laid to rest by the advent of the dis-intermediating information revolution.

If there is any flaw in this otherwise excellent volume, it is Mahbubani’s projection of East Asia’s trust in elites onto the West where their legitimacy has fatally withered.

Finally, as Mahbubani readily acknowledges, the Pax Americana period of a rules-based international system that provided global public goods also served U.S. interests. But, as former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has said in the European context, where values and identity much more closely coincide than, say, between China and the U.S., “it was believed that formalized rules would be enough” to contain the imbalances within the Eurozone without a full fiscal and political union. “But this foundation of rules turned out to be an illusion: principles always need the support of power or they cannot stand the test of reality.”

Even if the old rule-based system invented by the West ought to maintain, it cannot do so without the full engagement of China and the United States. No reorganization of the UN or the IMF or WTO will matter if these two powers don’t buy in. Given the weakness of elites in the U.S., this suggests that China — while its Communist Party autocracy is still invested with legitimacy and the broad allegiance of its public — needs to drive any new embrace of the global rules-based system in a way that provides common public goods for all.

Clearly, China’s leaders need to get ready for prime time. America, which can’t even decide at home how much government it wants and is willing to pay for, is in no position to take the lead in shaping a new world order that accommodates the interests of new players on the block. American democracy hasn’t even managed to rein in the “too big to fail” financial firms that instigated the global crisis in 2008-2009. They are bigger now than before. We can’t even agree to ban assault weapons on our own turf, no less achieve non-proliferation globally.

The danger is that this moment could be a repeat of 1914 — when a system of shaky alliances with waning and waxing powers jockeying for advantage was tripped into world war by a small event. The hope, which Mahbubani so optimistically and thoroughly sketches out in his vision, is that the immediate period ahead can be like the early 1950s when enduring institutions that kept the peace and promoted prosperity to the benefit of all were constructed.

A world adrift desperately needs global thinkers, most of all from Asia. Kishore Mahbubani fits the bill with this signal work at this critical time. The kind of robust institutions he calls for in his book are all that will stand between us and 1914 all over again. Let’s pray his optimism is justified.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/can-asia-step-up-to-remak_b_2424670.html

Book Review: Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Out of Order’

March 8, 2013

Books of The Times

Bumpy Start for a Court Cloaked in Grandeur

Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Out of Order’

by Michiko Kakutani (March 4, 2013)

Sandra Day O’Connor or, as she likes to call herself, the Fwotsc — the First Woman on the Supreme Court — is the author of one wonderful book: “Lazy B,” an evocative memoir about growing up among “old-time, long-suffering, good-natured cowboys” on a cattle ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Written with her brother, H. Alan Day, that book not only did a magical job of conjuring an isolated and now vanishing world of big skies and wide-open plains, but it also underscored how the frontier values of her childhood — self-reliance, competence and dependability — shaped her pragmatic judicial philosophy.

Her next book, “The Majesty of the Law,” a collection of speeches and essays on legal history, was drier and less revealing, although it contained some interesting musings on women and the law.

Her latest, “Out of Order,” is even more of a hodgepodge: a look at the history of the Supreme Court; portraits of famous justices, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and William O. Douglas; and a bunch of asides about things like humor on the court. (A law professor’s 2005 study of “laughter episodes instigated,” she notes, suggested that Antonin Scalia was the funniest justice, with Stephen Breyer coming in a faraway second.)

There are no big revelations in this volume about Bush v. Gore or the author’s thoughts on Roe v. Wade; nor are there momentous insights into the dynamics between Justice O’Connor and her colleagues on the bench, or how she felt about being the crucial swing justice, whom the legal writer Jeffrey Rosen once called “the most powerful woman in America.”

Her moving remarks about Thurgood Marshall here echo some she made in “The Majesty of the Law,” and other observations walk in the footsteps of ones she has made in the past as well.

The reason to read “Out of Order” is to get Justice O’Connor’s succinct, snappy account of how today’s court — so powerful, so controversial and so frequently dissected by the media — evolved from such startlingly humble and uncertain beginnings that it initially seemed like a jerry-built enterprise constructed on entirely ad hoc principles.

Justice O’Connor writes that in its early years, the court “had no home, little money, and virtually no cases” — “it is a wonder it survived at all!” Indeed many aspects of the court were “shaped and developed little by little, year by year, person by person.” After all, Article III of the Constitution, which vested the “judicial Power of the United States” in “one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” left Congress with an awful lot of blanks to fill in.

John Jay, nominated by George Washington to be the first Chief Justice of the new court, resigned the post after six years to become Governor of New York and spurned John Adams’s efforts to return him to the court, citing health problems and what he called the court’s lack of “energy, weight and dignity.” In his opinion, Justice O’Connor writes, “the Supreme Court would never amount to much.”

Early court records, she goes on, “were rife with textual errors, corrections and revisions” — not least because the clerk’s and reporter’s offices were a far cry from the professional operations they are today. Written opinions, she says, were not required until 1834, during President Andrew Jackson’s administration.

For almost a century and a half, the court lacked a permanent home and led a nomadic existence, moving from the Merchants Exchange Building in New York to what is now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia and later to the Capitol Building in Washington before settling, in 1935, into the magisterial marble edifice designed by the architect Cass Gilbert that it now occupies.

To complicate matters further, Justice O’Connor points out, for much of the court’s first century, the justices also had to serve as roving trial judges in the lower federal courts, traveling thousands of miles a year around the country (and this was before airplanes) to preside over trials and intermediate appeals. It took some justices six months a year, she reports, to complete their circuits — which meant six months a year away from their families, trundling from town to town over rough roads by horse and carriage and staying in taverns along the way, where “they were sometimes forced to share rooms with unsavory characters.”

Many other aspects of the court have also changed over the years, including the style of oral argument that lawyers have employed there. Justice O’Connor observes that the classical allusions and emotional appeals of a Daniel Webster (who compared the plight of Dartmouth College to that of Julius Caesar, surrounded “by those who are reiterating stab upon stab”) gradually gave way to the more concise, almost conversational style of Thurgood Marshall and his “understated method of answering questions with succinct answers,” which would prove to be “the path of the future.”

As for the vociferous debates over recent cases (like Bush v. Gore, perhaps, or Citizens United), Justice O’Connor suggests that they pale next to earlier events in the history of our judicial system. For instance, the Judiciary Act of 1801 (passed in the final days of John Adams’s administration) was denounced by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans as a Federalist scheme to pack the new circuit courts with Federalist appointments; and after the inauguration of Jefferson and a Republican-majority Congress, the act was repealed.

“In one stroke, the Republicans had dismissed 16 sitting federal judges, all of them appointed by the opposing party,” she writes. “Can you imagine the scandal? I don’t think anything in modern history even comes close. But the Republicans’ next move was even more brazen. To prevent the Supreme Court from striking down the Repeal Act as unconstitutional, Congress simply canceled the Court’s next Term!”

How else has the court changed in recent years? Justice O’Connor says it’s “highly unlikely” that a President today “would nominate a federal jurist who had no law degree and no experience as a lawyer or judge.”

And, she adds toward the end of this slender volume, you can “safely predict” that Byron White (chosen by President John F. Kennedy) will be the last Supreme Court justice “to ever lead the N.F.L. in rushing in a rookie season.”

A version of this review appeared in print on March 5, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bumpy Start For a Court Cloaked In Grandeur. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/books/sandra-day-oconnors-out-of-order.html?ref=books&_r=0

‘Wise Men’ by Stuart Nadler

March 2, 2013

Here is something light  and entertaining, yet philosophical about life. We all have our moments, both good and bad, except that some of us do not learn the lessons of life. We keep talking and blabbering to the Kingdom come in self justification, pouring out invented stories and revising history to fit our version of reality. I can only quote my favourite Black novelist James Baldwin of the Civil Rights era here for those who continue to remain in that mode (with apologies to Minister Rais Yatim): “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction”.–Din Merican

Books of The Times (www.nytimes.com)

One Summer and One Girl Will Define Him Throughout His Lifetime

‘Wise Men’ by Stuart Nadler

by Janet Maslin (02-24-13)

The title, setting and central romance of Stuart Nadler’s “Wise Men” are whoppingly bland. The novel is about two men, a father and son, whose surname is Wise. Its main setting is a pokey but fabulous seaside compound on Cape Cod. And at first it seems to be about That Summer, the time when a shy boy develops a hopeless crush on some unattainable woman and seems unlikely ever to get over her. Lots of gooey romances fit this description.

But Mr. Nadler’s version travels a long way from those inauspicious beginnings. And it gains strength as the story stretches over both Wise men’s lifetimes and fills them with resonant complications. It becomes a bigger, more surprising book than it initially seems to be.

“Wise Men” begins in 1947, with a plane crash that transforms Arthur Wise, a small-time litigator, into the nation’s most famous ambulance chaser. Arthur figures out a way to profit enormously from class-action lawsuits, specializes in air disaster and makes himself the terror of the aviation industry. He becomes enormously rich and isn’t shy about flaunting it. By the time Arthur buys a sizable chunk of Cape Cod coastline and settles his family there, his only child, 17-year-old Hilly, is mortified by his father’s showboating.

Hilly (born Hilton) narrates the book and recalls every little wince he experienced when the family moved to its grand new world. A lot of his mortification involves Lem Dawson, a black caretaker who lived there before the Wise guys took over.

“The sellers threw in their boy,” says Arthur, whose casual racism is only one of his cringe-worthy attributes. As Hilly becomes increasingly fascinated by Lem, his problems with his father get worse. That may be exactly what Hilly wants, but he’s too young to know it.

When Lem is visited by another black man and a young woman in a beat-up old Packard, Arthur berates him with typical crudeness. (“You call the whole goddamned N.A.A.C.P. over for a clambake?”) That’s not the only reason Hilly falls for Savannah, the girl in the car, who turns out to be Lem’s niece. But Mr. Nadler leaves it to his readers to guess what role Arthur’s bigotry plays in such a forbidden attraction. In any case, Hilly falls into a swoon over a girl he barely gets to know. He will yearn for Savannah for most of his life.

Even as Mr. Nadler sears That Summer into Hilly’s mind with an episode of terrible cruelty, “Wise Men” retains its early formulaic feel. It’s only after the book leaps forward two decades that its scope and impact can start being felt. At 38 Hilly has grown up to be a Boston newspaper reporter specializing in racial strife. The year is 1972, and he needn’t leave Boston in search of material.

Still, he travels to Iowa to follow up on a small news item he’s spotted. He thinks it may have something to do with Savannah. For reasons that remain intriguing because they’re so unexplored (by Hilly, garrulous as he is) and so understated (by Mr. Nadler, more subtly than might be expected), he remains determined to find her.

There are good reasons to bridle at such sentimentality. But Mr. Nadler counters them well. Hilly’s narrative voice ages so credibly that this book’s final pages really do sound as if they come from a much older and wiser man. (Eventually “Wise” makes a decent double entendre.) And Hilly’s sheer irrationality makes him much more interesting than he first seemed. He seeks a life he can never have and can’t stand the family he was born into.

Arthur craves his son and heir; Hilly refuses to be bought. To the chagrin of his girlfriend, Jenny, he won’t take a dime; if their roof leaks, tough luck. He hates the money, and he hates his father’s ruthlessness, which remains undimmed even when Arthur is in his 90s.

Mr. Nadler is also the author of “The Book of Life,” a short story collection. There are times when “Wise Men” feels like an interlocking series of stories, smoothly linked and anthologized. The description of Savannah’s father, a gambler and onetime baseball player, is expertly wrought, but it’s a tangential part of this big, rambling novel.

Each encounter between Hilly and Savannah exists in a world of its own. Arthur’s arrogant rich-guy antics are a whole other tale, as is the complicated relationship between Arthur and his only partner, a much quieter lawyer who moved to the Cape enclave with the Wises and stays there for the rest of his life. And Hilly’s life as a father and grandfather is touchingly different from his life as a lovestruck teenage boy.

As he grows up on the page, Hilly likes to overexplain himself to the reader. “Time does that,” he says, as an older man looking backward; “it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.” Talk kills mystique too, and by some lights “Wise Men” talks too much about too little. But in taking a long view of his characters’ lives, and following them so closely, Mr. Nadler finally gives them what they’ve lacked: staying power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/books/wise-men-by-stuart-nadler.html?ref=books

A version of this review appeared in print on February 25, 2013, on page C9 of the New York edition with the headline: One Summer and One Girl Will Define Him Throughout His Lifetime.

NY Times Sunday Book Review: “Ike and Dick” By Jeffrey Frank

February 17, 2013

The Odd Couple

‘Ike and Dick,’ by Jeffrey Frank

by Joe Scarborough,  February 15, 2013

It may be the closest of political relationships, but it rarely ends well. Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams for the top spot in the vicious campaign of 1800. President Andrew Jackson mused sardonically about executing Vice President John C. Calhoun.

In the modern era, Lyndon Johnson seethed at slights real and perceived during John Kennedy’s thousand days, then turned around and humiliated his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Even Dick Cheney and George W. Bush fell out by the end of their tumultuous terms. But perhaps the most intriguing — and dysfunctional — political marriage in history was the one between the subjects of Jeffrey Frank’s meticulously researched “Ike and Dick.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president memorably said that being No. 2 was in effect not worth a bucket of warm spit. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president may have considered that assessment overly generous after spending eight years under the heel of a war hero whose sunny smile hid the soul of a cold, calculating politician. Frank, a former editor at both The New Yorker and The Washington Post, examines how Ike’s cool nature and detached management style left Richard Nixon insecure and embittered through the remainder of his political career.

“Ike and Dick” is a highly engrossing political narrative that skillfully takes the reader through the twisted development of a strange relationship that would help shape America’s foreign and domestic agenda for much of the 20th century. The two men’s political paths first crossed in 1952 after Eisenhower’s advisers listed Nixon as a potential running mate. (When later asked to explain the pick, Eisenhower would say dismissively, “He was on the list.”) But once his choice was made, Ike found himself tied to a political brawler whose aggressiveness on the campaign trail embarrassed him even when he benefited from those rough-and-tumble tactics.

Eisenhower, whose legacy was assured by the victory in World War II, harbored a quiet disdain for ambitious politicians like Nixon, preferring instead the company of a coterie of self-made, accomplished and influential business leaders. Throughout his public life, Ike was not simply a member of the club — he was the club, whether on the course at Augusta National or playing bridge at Camp David with the most powerful men in the country. The resentful Nixon, by contrast, was in constant battle with an East Coast establishment that would never fully accept him. But as “Ike and Dick” vividly shows, nothing written in a New York Times editorial or caricatured in a Herblock cartoon could sting Nixon like the rejection he faced repeatedly from his own boss.

During the 1952 presidential campaign, after the press reported on a secret Nixon fund, Eisenhower had the New York governor Thomas Dewey deliver the news that he wanted his running mate off the ticket. Nixon later said the episode “left a deep scar which was never to heal completely.” Four years later, Ike once again considered dumping Nixon, and once again the vice president survived the near-death political experience, but he called it “another period of agonizing indecision.” The deepest wound inflicted by Eisenhower, however, came in the middle of Nixon’s own tough 1960 campaign against Kennedy, when the aging president was asked to name one policy position taken over eight years that Nixon had influenced. “If you give me a week, I might think of one,” was Ike’s cold response.

Those betrayals left a lasting mark. Frank writes, “Nixon could never be sure what Eisenhower really thought of him, but it never ceased to matter, and his restive pursuit of Ike’s good opinion remained one of the few constants in an extraordinary life.” Like Lyndon Johnson’s after him, much of Nixon’s pathos sprang from his painful contemplation of his boss’s public slights.

“Ike and Dick” begins on the day General Eisenhower arrived in Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade celebrating his leadership in the victory against Hitler’s Germany — and with a young Navy Lieutenant Commander Nixon straining to get a better look at the great general through 30 stories of confetti. The book ends a ­quarter-century later inside Nixon’s own Oval Office, with the president bitterly sobbing at the news of Ike’s death, knowing that the acceptance he always craved would never come. Nixon eventually created his own mythic deathbed scene, in which the dying general slowly lifted his right hand in final salute to his able No. 2.

Through it all, Nixon tempered his burning ambition. He remained the loyal soldier in a continuing attempt to prove his worth, while seeking Eisenhower’s trust and confidence through persistent public demonstrations of his subordinate position. In the process, he redefined the office of vice president for the modern era.

A fascinating subplot in Frank’s story details Nixon’s role in pushing the administration on the issue of civil rights. Long criticized as the author of the Republican Party’s racially tinged “Southern strategy,” Nixon is shown by Frank to be a determined advocate for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, as well as a trusted ally of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson. Robinson wrote to Nixon after passage of the bill, stating, “I and many others will never forget the fight you made and what you stand for.” King was even more effusive, saying how “deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the civil rights bill a reality.”

Nixon’s support of King’s cause angered Southern conservatives and further distanced the vice president from his disapproving president. He would even be attacked by Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, for heading a “concerted propaganda campaign” in support of a stronger voting rights bill. Despite this abuse, Nixon argued that Republicans should remain the party of Lincoln on civil rights. Because Eisenhower disagreed, Republicans ceded the issue to a converted Johnson and the Democratic Party, losing the African-American vote for at least the next 50 years.

After Eisenhower’s presidency — in the period Nixon referred to as his “wilderness years” — Ike began to show a more personal interest in Nixon. Having taken a well-paid position at a prestigious Wall Street law firm, Nixon had temporarily become the kind of man Eisenhower was always drawn to — a wealthy member of the establishment. But to the end, the legendary war hero from Kansas remained little more than a distant figure to his vice president, who always wanted to believe that he had more value to Ike than simply being “on the list.”

Joe Scarborough is the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

A version of this review appeared in print on February 17, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lives of the Party.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/books/review/ike-and-dick-by-jeffrey-frank.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

Book Review: ‘Engineers of Victory,’ by Paul Kennedy

February 9, 2013

War Machines

‘Engineers of Victory,’ by Paul Kennedy

By Michael Beschloss
Published: February 8, 2013

The historian Daniel Boorstin once complained to me about the Smithsonian Institution’s decision in 1980 to delete the final two words from the name of its Museum of History and Technology. Boorstin had a point.

Scholars of other fields do often tend to underestimate the influence of technology. Although most of us know that World War II brought us radar, the literature of that titanic conflict is by no means exempt from this phenomenon. For instance, the biographer Joseph P. Lash subtitled his 1976 wartime account of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill “The Partnership That Saved the West,” in response to which I once heard a British scholar carp, “If Lash is right, then why did all those scientists and intelligence officers and factory workers bother working so hard?”

With this fresh and discursive new work, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, best known for his widely debated “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” published in 1987, calls attention to the way “small groups of individuals and institutions” surmounted seemingly insuperable operational obstacles to enable Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill and Stalin ultimately to grasp the laurels for an Allied triumph.

“Engineers of Victory” achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history. Unlike most studies of the war, this one is not primarily about politics, generalship or battlefield glories. References to the Big Three are few. Instead, like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how ­little-known men and women at lower ­levels helped win the war.

Kennedy concentrates mainly on the European theater and on Allied progress during the period from early 1943, when Hitler’s Admiral Doenitz sank 108 Allied vessels in a single month, provoking fears that England would be starved of essential bunker fuel, to the almost fantastic summer of 1944, when British and American troops scrambled onto Festung Europa. By Kennedy’s telling, a number of concurrent accomplishments spelled the difference between victory and, if not defeat, then, at least, a struggle that might have dragged on past 1945, with countless additional casualties.

The first was ensuring that Allied convoys could cross the Atlantic without being sunk by Germans. As Kennedy acknowledges, this was the first war in which sea power’s success was decided by air power, so part of the solution was cranking out airplanes (especially long-range bombers). But vital too were innovations like the Hedgehog, a forward-firing ship-­mounted mortar (devised by an idiosyncratic British unit called “Wheezers and Dodgers”), and the Leigh Light, which exposed German U-boats that were surfacing at night to recharge batteries so that British bombers could do their deadly work. In contrast with the cadre of popular and scholarly authors who since the 1970s have written, often breathlessly, about glamorous code breakers, Kennedy is skeptical of Bletchley Park’s importance, because the intelligence operation known as Ultra “could do only so much.”

Command of the air over Germany was seized only when American squadrons arrived to augment the Royal Air Force, upend the existing British doctrine of restricting attacks to nighttime and demand pinpoint bombing of specifically identified German military and industrial targets. The zenith of Allied accomplishment in the air, of course, was D-Day 1944, when a previously unimaginable 11,590 planes were sent aloft. “There had been nothing like it in world history,”

Kennedy writes, “nor has there been since. . . . There was no chance for the completely diminished Luftwaffe to do anything except lose more and more of its planes and pilots whenever they rose into the air.” Kennedy goes on to describe how the Allies stopped the ferocious blitzkrieg assaults of 1939 to 1942 by deploying “stronger, tougher and better-equipped forces (with panzers, bazookas, mines, better tactical aircraft)” in concert with the western thrust of the Soviet Army, aided by their T-34-85, which Kennedy calls the “most all-round battle tank” of the war.

Victory in Europe before the summer of 1945 also required the Allies to make hasty progress in perfecting the art of amphibious warfare. After World War I, Kennedy notes, with “a badly defeated and much-­reduced Germany, in a badly damaged and scarcely victorious France and Italy, and in an infant Soviet Union, there were many thoughts of war, but none of them involved the projection of force across the oceans.” The disheartening debacle of the one-day Allied trial effort in August 1942 to breach the Atlantic Wall with a raid against the modest German garrison at Dieppe, France, provided crucial lessons that led directly to the world-­important success on D-Day two years later.

Kennedy shows how wise the Allies were to restrain themselves from invading France until their commanders and troops had gained more experience in amphibious landings and until control of the Atlantic had been secured. He insists that D-Day could have been a rout but for the fact that by mid-1944, British, American and Canadian warriors — from the top down — had transformed their organization into a smoothly functioning apparatus, refined their means of gathering intelligence and designed the now-­famous “bodyguard of lies” that misled the Nazis about when and how the Allies would invade Europe.

Succinctly covering the Pacific theater, Kennedy illuminates some of the main tools that enabled United States forces to make their slow progress across the ocean in order to bomb Japan — new fast carrier groups, new fighters like the F6F and bombers like the B-29, as well as the American submarine service and the 325,000 enlisted members of the Navy’s construction battalions, the “Seabees,” which by the end of the war had erected $10 billion worth of military infrastructure around the world.

While Kennedy rightly elevates the importance of technology and those much-too-­unheralded bands of Allied innovators, on a grander scale he fully appreciates that “the winning of great wars always requires superior organization,” which “will allow outsiders to feed fresh ideas into the pursuit of victory.”

An ingredient badly missing from the centralized systems of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany was the willingness, demonstrated again and again by top Anglo-American military and political leaders, to share power with those of more modest rank who had greater expertise in tackling a particular problem and who were closer to the action. Kennedy notes that even the dictatorial Stalin “began to relax his iron grasp once he understood that he had a team of first-class generals working for him.”

Although occasionally prolix and repetitive, Kennedy’s volume is an important contribution to our understanding of World War II, and it sets a high standard for historians writing about other conflicts by reminding us to keep a close eye on technology. The curious reader may well finish this book and wish that scholars would pay more attention to how much American setbacks in lesser wars like Korea and Vietnam might have been influenced by gaps in our technological mastery.

Michael Beschloss, the author, most recently, of “Presidential Courage,” is writing a history of American presidential leadership in wartime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/engineers-of-victory-by-paul-kennedy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

A version of this review appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: War Machines.

RIP, Barry Wain

February 5, 2013

http://asiasentinel.com

Veteran Journalist and Editor dies in Singapore

by Asia Sentinel

Barry Wain, who died Tuesday in a Singapore hospital, was one of the finest, most dedicated foreign journalists to have worked in Asia, with a career in the region spanning more than forty years. His last major published work, Malaysian Maverick, a biography of Mahathir Mohamad, is ample testimony to his combination of in-depth research, fair judgment and willingness to confront his subject with some unpalatable truths.

Barry, an Australian from Brisbane, worked for The Australian in Canberra before moving to Hong Kong where he worked on a local newspaper and then on the desk of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He joined the Asian Wall Street Journal when it was established in 1976 and was soon posted as its correspondent in Kuala Lumpur and to Bangkok in the early 1980s. During his time there he wrote, The Refused, a book about the plight of Vietnamese refugees. He later moved back to Hong Kong as Managing Editor of the Journal and subsequently became a roving correspondent and columnist focusing on Southeast Asia.

For the past several years he has been a scholar at the Institute for South East Asian Studies in Singapore. His position as writer in residence enabled him to undertake the research for his book on Mahathir  a work widely praised as the only balanced account of the career of one of Asia’s leading and controversial political figures.

Barry was a fine tennis player as well as an amiable colleague who kept trim and fit. His death followed months of complications from what was supposed to be a routine operation earlier last year.

He is survived by his wife Yvonne and son David. He will be missed by his many former colleagues and by the readers who learned so much from his dedication as a journalist who combined hard work with high principles.

Read Asia Sentinel’s review of Barry’s last book: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Book Review: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Written by John Berthelsen

Friday, 04 December 2009

by Barry Wain. Palgrave Macmillan, 363pp. Available through Amazon, US$60.75. Available for Pre-order, to be released Jan 5.In 1984 or 1985, when I was an Asian Wall Street Journal correspondent in Malaysia, an acquaintance called me and said he had seen a US Army 2-1/2 ton truck, known as a “deuce-and-a-half,” filled with US military personnel in jungle gear on a back road outside of Kuala Lumpur. Since Malaysia and the United States were hardly close friends at that point, I immediately went to the US Embassy in KL and asked what the US soldiers were doing there. I received blank stares. Similar requests to the Malaysian Ministry of Defense brought the same response. After a few days of chasing the story, I concluded that my acquaintance must have been seeing things and dropped it. It turns out he wasn’t seeing things after all. In a new book, “Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times,” launched Dec. 4 in Asia, former Asian Wall Street Journal editor Barry Wain solved the mystery. In 1984, during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir met President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral Training and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series of working groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical support and general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir continued display a public antipathy on general principles at the Americans while his jungle was crawling with US troops quietly training for jungle warfare. That ability to work both sides of the street was a Mahathir characteristic. In his foreword, Wain, in what is hoped to be a definitive history of the former prime minister’s life and career, writes that “while [Mahathir] has been a public figure in Malaysia for half a century and well known abroad for almost as long, he has presented himself as a bundle of contradictions: a Malay champion who was the Malays’ fiercest critic and an ally of Chinese-Malaysian businessmen; a tireless campaigner against Western economic domination who assiduously courted American and European capitalists; a blunt, combative individual who extolled the virtues of consensual Asian values.” Wain was granted access to the former premier for a series of exhaustive interviews. It may well be the most definitive picture painted of Mahathir to date, and certainly is even-handed. Wain, now a writer in residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, is by no means a Mahathir sycophant. Advance publicity for the book has dwelt on an assertion by Wain that Mahathir may well have wasted or burned up as much as RM100 billion (US$40 billion at earlier exchange rates when the projects were active) on grandiose projects and the corruption that the projects engendered as he sought to turn Malaysia into an industrialized state. Although some in Malaysia have said the figure is too high, it seems about accurate, considering such ill-advised projects as a national car, the Proton, which still continues to bleed money and cost vastly more in opportunity costs for Malaysian citizens forced to buy any other make at huge markups behind tariff walls. In addition, while Thailand in particular became a regional center for car manufacture and for spares, Malaysia, handicapped by its national car policy, was left out. Almost at the start of the book, Wain encapsulates the former Premier so well that it bears repeating here: Mahathir, he writes, “had an all-consuming desire to turn Malaysia into a modern, industrialized nation commanding worldwide respect. Dr Mahathir’s decision to direct the ruling party into business in a major way while the government practiced affirmative action, changed the nature of the party and accelerated the spread of corruption. One manifestation was the eruption of successive financial scandals, massive by any standards, which nevertheless left Dr Mahathir unfazed and unapologetic.” That pretty much was the story of Malaysia for the 22 years that Mahathir was in charge. There is no evidence that Mahathir himself was ever involved in corruption. Once, as Ferdinand Marcos was losing his grip on the Philippines, Mahathir pointed out to a group of reporters that he was conveyed around in a long black Daimler – the same model as the British ambassador used – that the Istana where he lived was a huge mansion, that he had everything he needed. Why, he asked, was there any need to take money from corruption? Nonetheless, in his drive to foster a Malay entrepreneurial class, he allowed those around him to pillage the national treasury almost at will, which carried over into UMNO after he had left office and which blights the country to this day. Wain follows intricate trails through much of this, ranging from the attempt, okayed by Mahathir, to attempt to rescue Bumiputra Malaysia Finance in the early 1980s which turned into what at the time was the world’s biggest banking scandal. In the final analysis, much as Lee Kuan Yew down the road in Singapore strove to create a nation in his own image and largely succeeded, so did Mahathir. Both nations are flawed – Singapore in its mixture of technological and social prowess and draconian ruthlessness against an independent press or opposition, Malaysia with its iconic twin towers and its other attributes colored by a deepening culture of corruption that has continued well beyond his reign, which ended in 2003. Mahathir must bear the blame for much of this, in particular his destruction of an independent judiciary, as Wain writes, to further his aims. Mahathir, as the former Premier said in the conversation over his mansion and his car, had everything including, one suspects, a fully-developed sense of injustice. He appears to this day to continue to resent much of the west, particularly the British. Wain writes exhaustively of Mahathir’s deep antagonism over both British elitism during the colonial days and the disdain of his fellow Malays (Mahathir’s parentage is partly Indian Muslim on his father’s side), especially the Malay royalty. That antagonism against the British has been a hallmark of his career – from the time he instituted the “Buy British Last” policy for the Malaysian government as prime minister to the present day. Robert Mugabe, in disgrace across much of the world for the way his policies have destroyed what was one of the richest countries in Africa, remains in Mahathir’s good graces. Asked recently why that was, an aide told me Mugabe had driven the British out of Zimbabwe and was continuing to drive out white farmers to this day, although he was replacing them with people who knew nothing of farming. That expropriation of vast tracts of white-owned land might have destroyed Zimbabwe’s agricultural production. But, the aide said, “He got the Brits out.” For anybody wishing to understand Mahathir and the nation he transformed, Wain’s book is going to be a must – but bring spectacles. The tiny type and gray typeface make it a difficult read. And a disclaimer: Wain was once my boss.

Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens

February 1, 2013

The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/technology/literary-history-seen-through-big-datas-lens.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens

by Steve Lohr (01-26-13)

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.

The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).

These findings are hardly the last word. At this stage, this kind of digital analysis is mostly an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities. The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.

“Traditionally, literary history was done by studying a relative handful of texts,” says Mr. Jockers, an Assistant Professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. “What this technology does is let you see the big picture — the context in which a writer worked — on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

Mr. Jockers, 46, personifies the digital advance in the humanities. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Southern Illinois University, but was also fascinated by computing and became a self-taught programmer. Before he moved to the University of Nebraska last year, he spent more than a decade at Stanford, where he was a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to the digital exploration of books.

Today, Mr. Jockers describes the tools of his trade in terms familiar to an Internet software engineer — algorithms that use machine learning and network analysis techniques. His mathematical models are tailored to identify word patterns and thematic elements in written text. The number and strength of links among novels determine influence, much the way Google ranks Web sites.

It is this ability to collect, measure and analyze data for meaningful insights that is the promise of Big Data technology. In the humanities and social sciences, the flood of new data comes from many sources including books scanned into digital form, Web sites, blog posts and social network communications.

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

“Some call it computer science and some call it statistics, but the essence is that these algorithmic methods are increasingly part of every discipline now,” says Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Cultural data analysts often adapt biological analogies to describe their work. Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. Mr. Michel and another researcher, Erez Lieberman Aiden, led a project to mine the virtual book depository known as Google Books and to track the use of words over time, compare related words and even graph them.

Google cooperated and built the software for making graphs open to the public. The initial version of Google’s cultural exploration site began at the end of 2010, based on more than five million books, dating from 1500. By now, Google has scanned 20 million books, and the site is used 50 times a minute. For example, type in “women” in comparison to “men,” and you see that for centuries the number of references to men dwarfed those for women. The crossover came in 1985, with women ahead ever since.

In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.

Their work, published last year, focused on what makes spoken lines in movies memorable. Sentences that endure in the public mind are evolutionary success stories, Mr. Kleinberg says, comparing “the fitness of language and the fitness of organisms.”

As a yardstick, the researchers used the “memorable quotes” selected from the popular Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, and the number of times that a particular movie line appears on the Web. Then they compared the memorable lines to the complete scripts of the movies in which they appeared — about 1,000 movies.

To train their statistical algorithms on common sentence structure, word order and most widely used words, they fed their computers a huge archive of articles from news wires. The memorable lines consisted of surprising words embedded in sentences of ordinary structure. “We can think of memorable quotes as consisting of unusual word choices built on a scaffolding of common part-of-speech patterns,” their study said.

Consider the line “You had me at hello,” from the movie “Jerry Maguire.” It is, Mr. Kleinberg notes, basically the same sequence of parts of speech as the quotidian “I met him in Boston.” Or consider this line from “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Only one word separates that utterance from this: “I love the smell of coffee in the morning.”

This kind of analysis can be used for all kinds of communications, including advertising. Indeed, Mr. Kleinberg’s group also looked at ad slogans. Statistically, the ones most similar to memorable movie quotes included “Quality never goes out of style,” for Levi’s jeans, and “Come to Marlboro Country,” for Marlboro cigarettes.

But the algorithmic methods aren’t a foolproof guide to real-world success. One ad slogan that didn’t fit well within the statistical parameters for memorable lines was the Energizer batteries catchphrase, “It keeps going and going and going.”

Quantitative tools in the humanities and the social sciences, as in other fields, are most powerful when they are controlled by an intelligent human. Experts with deep knowledge of a subject are needed to ask the right questions and to recognize the shortcomings of statistical models.

“You’ll always need both,” says Mr. Jockers, the literary quant. “But we’re at a moment now when there is much greater acceptance of these methods than in the past. There will come a time when this kind of analysis is just part of the tool kit in the humanities, as in every other discipline.”

JON KLEINBERG, a computer scientist at Cornell, and a group of researchers approached collective memory from a very different perspective.

Correction: January 27, 2013

 An earlier version of this article misstated Matthew L. Jockers’s age. He is 46, not 48. It also misspelled the title of the movie known for the line “You had me at hello.” It is “Jerry Maguire,” not “Jerry McGuire.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Dickens, Austen and Twain, Viewed in a Digital Lens.

New Book by Dr. M Bakri Musa: Liberating the Malay Mind

January 23, 2013

SYNOPSIS by ZI Publications: In Liberating The Malay Mind, Dr M. Bakri Musa maps with clarity a path towards a liberated Malaysia by carefully examining the country’s past and evaluating the current Malay obsession with Ketuanan Melayu. This book explores the ways in how special rights and “sons of the soil” privileges bestowed have inhibited the Malay people from forging an educated, dynamic and globally competitive Tanah Melayu.

Dr. Bakri examines Malay culture through the prisms of history, psyche and religion and details the steps necessary to liberate the collective Malay mindset through free access to information, an enlightened education system, and engagement in commerce.

With this careful navigation, and not by pinning hopes on the political amulet of Article 153, Liberating The Malay Mind forges a way towards a self-sufficient Malaysia, able to turn crises into opportunities, and challenges into inspirations.

“Unlike our political merdeka – which was granted to us by the British – our liberated mind can not be bestowed. We have to strive for it. Then we will be Tuans even elsewhere other than Tanah Melayu.” says Dr. Bakri.

About the Author: Malaysian-born M. Bakri Musa, a California surgeon, writes frequently on issues affecting his native land. His credits, apart from scientific articles in professional journals, have appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, International Herald Tribune, Education Quarterly, and New Straits Times. His commentary has also aired on National Public Radio’s Marketplace.

He is the author of The Malay Dilemma Revisited: Race Dynamics in Modern Malaysia, Malaysia in the Era of Globalization, and An Education System Worthy of Malaysia and Towards A Competitive Malaysia.

Safely beyond the reach of Malaysia’s censorship laws, he writes freely and without restraint, save for common courtesy and good taste.He spares no individual or institution, easily skewering the sacred cows. He aims his dart at the most hyper-inflated targets, easily and effectively puncturing them to reveal their hollowness. These range from the obscenely ostentatious Malaysian weddings to special privileges, and from Prime Minister Mahathir to youths who do Malaysia proud.

Jared Diamond: By the Book

January 19, 2013

Published: January 17, 2013

The author of “The World Until Yesterday” says that if he had to recommend one book of geography to children, he would suggest his own “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

What book is on your night stand now?

Sabine Kuegler, “Child of the Jungle.” This unique book is the autobiography of the daughter of a German missionary linguist couple, who moved when she was a child to live with a Fayu clan in a remote area of swamp forest in Indonesian New Guinea. The Fayu experienced first contact with outsiders under terrifying conditions, while I was working in the area in 1979.

In the Fayu village while Sabine was growing up there, the only non-Fayu were Sabine, her parents and her two siblings. Sabine grew up speaking Fayu (as well as German, Indonesian and English), with all of her playmates Fayu children, and learning to think and act like a Fayu. At the age of 17 her parents sent her back to Europe to attend boarding school.

The result for Sabine was an extreme case of culture shock. This book approximates an account of Western society through the eyes of a New Guinean. Europe was as much of a shock to Sabine as the New Guinea jungle is to a Westerner. Through Sabine’s words, we experience what it is like to encounter traffic lights, trains and strangers for the first time. By Fayu standards, the variety of chocolates in Europe is wonderful, but the way that Europeans treat each other is not wonderful. This book gives a view of Western life from a fresh perspective shared by no Westerner.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Primo Levi, “If This Is a Man” (original, “Se Questo È un Uomo,” 1947). At one level, Levi’s book is about how as a young Italian Jewish chemist joining the resistance during World War II, he was captured, sent to Auschwitz, and survived. At another level, the book is about our everyday life issues, magnified: the life-and-death consequences of chance, the problem of evil, the impossibility of separating one’s moral code from surrounding circumstances, and the difficulties of maintaining one’s sanity and humanness in the presence of injustice and bad people.

Levi dealt with these issues and was lucky, with the result that he survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the greatest authors (both of nonfiction and fiction) of postwar Italy. But he survived at a price. One of the prices, the loss of his religious beliefs, he summarized as follows: “I must say that the experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away any remnants of the religious education that I had had. . . . Auschwitz existed, therefore God cannot exist. I find no solution to that dilemma. I seek a solution, but I don’t find it.”

If you had to come up with your own Best of 2012 list, what book would be at the top?

There were so many good books in 2012 that rather than attempt to identify the best of them, I’ll mention here one that is among the best and that deserves more attention than it has received. It’s Howard Steven Friedman, “The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing.” Despite the subtitle, this book is not just another one of hundreds of books making recommendations about what the U.S. should be doing. Instead, Friedman compares the United States with 13 other rich countries in five vital measures of individual and national security: health, safety, education, democracy and equality.

Friedman explains clearly and convincingly, writes engagingly and laces his text with personal examples. Contrary to what many Americans think, the U.S. does not lead the world by these measures. Friedman’s recommendations are specific and feasible. I’m glad that I resisted my instinct of dismissing the book when I first saw its cover: it’s thought-provoking, and good reading.

What’s your favorite genre? Any guilty pleasures?

The genre in which I do most of my leisure reading (i.e., reading not targeted for researching my own next book) is Italian literature. My original motive was to practice my grasp on the Italian language, which I took up at age 61. But it turns out that Italy has been blessed with some of the world’s great writers, from Dante, Boccaccio and Machiavelli in the past to several modern authors whom I mention here in answers to other questions.

If you could require the President to read one book, what would it be?

It would be Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince.” Machiavelli is frequently dismissed today as an amoral cynic who supposedly considered the end to justify the means. In fact, Machiavelli is a crystal-clear realist who understands the limits and uses of power. Fundamental to his thinking is the distinction he draws between the concepts expressed in Italian as virtù and fortuna. These don’t mean “virtue” and “fortune.”

Instead, virtù refers to the sphere in which a statesman can influence his world by his own actions, contrasted with fortuna, meaning the role of chance beyond a statesman’s control. But Machiavelli makes clear, in a wonderful metaphor contrasting an uncontrollable flood with protective measures that can be taken in anticipation of a flood, that we are not helpless at the hands of bad luck. Among a statesman’s tasks is to anticipate what might go wrong, and to plan for it. Every president (and all of us non-politicians as well) should read Machiavelli and incorporate his thinking.

What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

Two books stand out. One is “The Complete Sherlock Holmes”: all 1,122 pages, containing four novels and 56 short stories. I read them first as a child and have reread them about every 10 years since then, including reading them to my own sons when they were children.

The other book is Thoreau’s “Walden,” which I read once when I was young, and which was the single book that has most influenced me. Thoreau’s message that I took away was: Be honest with yourself, think clearly, decide what is most important and do it regardless of what other people think. Reading Thoreau felt like standing in dazzlingly bright light.

What’s the best book for a parent to buy for a child interested in learning more about geography and the relationship between geography and society? 

I believe that I’m being realistic, not egotistical or self-promoting, when I answer: my own book “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” The book explains the long-term effects of geography — especially continental differences in wild plant and animal species available for domestication, and in shapes, areas and isolations — in molding the different histories of the peoples native to the different continents.

While I wrote the book for adults, to my surprise it has been frequently adopted in schools. I discovered this when one day my twin sons, then in seventh grade, came home from school angry at me. They explained, “Daddy, our class has been assigned a chapter of your book to read, and the teacher will invite you in to discuss your book, and we haven’t read your book yet, but we are sure that it is a bad book.”

When I did receive the teacher’s invitation and arrived at the class, my sons were seated in the back row, with their gazes averted in embarrassment and disgust. But my sons warmed up when they saw that their classmates hadn’t hated but had enjoyed my book. By the end of the class, my sons were smiling. Since then, they have been among my most devoted defenders, and they erupt in indignation if they hear any of my books criticized. Since that visit to my sons’ school, I’ve had many school visits and invitations, and letters daily from schoolchildren of all ages who have been stimulated by my books.

What was the last book that made you cry? The last book that made you laugh? 

The answers to both of those questions are: the same book or series of books. It’s the series of Don Camillo stories, by the modern Italian author Giovanni Guareschi, collected in three volumes. The stories are set in a small Italian town, and involve three protagonists: the local priest Don Camillo; the mayor Peppone; and the church’s Christ statue, which Don Camillo consults regularly for advice and which answers. Don Camillo and Peppone clash constantly in words and occasionally with their fists. But the two of them are joined by a common sense of humanity. The Don Camillo stories range from gut-wrenchingly tragic to hilarious. Whenever I start the next story in Guareschi’s collection, I never know in advance whether it will make me cry or laugh.

What’s the best love story you’ve ever read? 

Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” — even though the love goes sour and the book has a sad ending.

Name a book you just couldn’t finish.

Modern Italy’s leading woman author is Dacia Maraini. She has written many wonderful, realistic, emotionally rich novels and short stories, all of which I have enjoyed — with one exception. Her book “Woman at War” (“Donna in Guerra”) describes unpleasant protagonists experiencing unpleasant events and relationships. Precisely because Dacia Maraini’s writing is so convincing, by Page 97 I couldn’t stand to submerge myself any longer in that unpleasantness, and I stopped reading.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

My choice would be the classical Greek historian Thucydides, who devoted the latter part of his life to a book detailing the history of the long series of wars between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C. His book is considered to have laid the foundations of the discipline of history. I read Thucydides every decade or so, about as often as I read “Sherlock Holmes.”

The reasons why Thucydides is still widely read today, over 2,400 years after he lived, are that his insights into politics and war are universal and still relevant; his moral and psychological reflections on war and history are profound; and his accounts of debates and battles are thrilling. If I met him, I would be curious to discover whether he was really as devoid of humor as is his book.

In his entire book there is not a single sentence that could be considered remotely humorous, no less a joke. Second, I would want to ask him how he managed to write such a calm and dispassionate account of a passionate and vicious war, when he himself served as an Athenian general but was fired and exiled after a defeat, and when he loved and admired one of the two sides (the Athenians). Finally, I would ask him the same question that all subsequent historians have wondered: How close to the original does he think are his verbatim accounts of lengthy speeches at whose delivery he was not ­present?

What are you planning to read next?

I am going to reread ­Thucydides.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 20, 2013, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Jared Diamond. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/books/review/jared-diamond-by-the-book.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

Strategic Advice, Long Before You Invest

January 16, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com

Off the Shelf

by Paul B.Brown (Published: January 12, 2013)

TWO market veterans have new books out, offering thoughts about how to invest. But their suggestions come with a twist.

Jake Guevara/The New York Times

Jake Guevara/The New York Times

Instead of telling you what to buy and when, Ken Fisher, who runs Fisher Investments, a large money management firm, and Barton M. Biggs, the former Morgan Stanley partner and hedge fund manager who died before his book was published, mainly provide ideas to consider before you even think about placing your money.

Let’s begin with Mr. Fisher. He makes two very solid points in “Plan Your Prosperity” (Wiley, $26.95), which he wrote with Lara Hoffmans.

First, Mr. Fisher writes, “many investors and even some professionals distinguish between financial planning and retirement planning like they’re two distinct phases, or the two are inherently radically different.” That, he says, is wrong. Your approach — save as much as you can, invest wisely, and so on — should always be the same. It’s just that your time horizon, and therefore the investments you choose, will vary depending on whether you are saving for a long-term goal like retirement or a near-term goal like buying a house or paying for college.

Second, he argues that your investing should be “benchmark” driven.Here is how this could work — and the example is ours, not his: You decide how much you want to make on your money — say, 8 percent — and what kind of investments you are comfortable with. We will assume that it’s a mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds. Then you find an appropriate measuring stick. For this example, you would use a balanced index — 60 percent of which tracked a broad stock market index like the Wilshire 5000, and 40 percent of which mirrored a broad bond index like the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate.

Then you would either buy a mutual fund, like the Vanguard Balanced Index fund, designed to match the benchmark, or build a portfolio on your own that mimicked it.

The fact that we had to create an example underscores a flaw with the book: it is very short on specifics. And that is by design. Mr. Fisher says up front that he is not going to offer benchmark or asset-allocation recommendations. His reasoning is that he doesn’t want to make explicit suggestions without knowing your specific hopes and circumstances. One size, he says, does not fit all.

That’s fair enough. But detailed — if only hypothetical — examples of how to put his advice into practice would have been helpful. It makes sense that your investing approach should be all of one piece, but how exactly do you save for a house you want to buy within five years while still investing for your retirement, which could be decades away?

True, there is no single answer. But laying out a series of possible routes would allow readers to make an educated choice.

The lack of specifics is particularly frustrating for two reasons. First, the subtitle says that this is “the only retirement guide you’ll ever need, starting now — whether you’re 22, 52 or 82.” It’s not, unless you’re an extremely experienced investor, in which case you don’t need the book anyway.

Second, when you read Mr. Fisher’s biography on the book jacket, which notes that he has written a Forbes column for 28 years and is ranked No. 764 on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list, you may be expecting more in the way of “how to’s” from what he has learned along the way.The big ideas are fine, but you are left wanting more.

YOU probably won’t have that reaction to “Diary of a Hedgehog” (Wiley, $29.95), which is actually a diary from the last few years of Mr. Biggs’s life.

My diary, if I kept one, would include things like: “Jan. 5: Tuna fish salad for lunch. Too much celery.” Mr. Biggs’s contains entries like: “The investment process is only half the battle. The other weighty component is struggling with yourself and immunizing yourself from the psychological effects of the swings in the market, career risk” and the like. He also writes: “We are all vulnerable in varying proportions to the deliberating and destructive consequences of these malignancies, and there are no easy answers.”

You can skip over the day-to-day details of what was going on in the markets from mid-2010 to early 2012, the period covered by the diary. (On the other hand, it is interesting to see that despite his stellar record as a stock picker — Institutional Investor named Mr. Biggs to its All-America Research Team 10 times — he agonized when his picks were down for extended periods.)

The important parts are his comments, which often come as asides:

• “Warren Buffett has said he prefers to get his emerging-market exposure through companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, etc. I prefer mine through more direct participation.”

• Commodities are “not an investment,” he says. “An investment by definition is either current income or a stream of future income. When you buy a commodity, you have to be assuming that you are going to be able to sell it at a higher price to someone else, because it has no income. Thus, it is not investing — it is speculating.”

• “Sometimes twiddling your thumbs is the least malignant activity.”

• “I can seldom remember such overwhelming bearishness by the great wise men, professors and stock market soothsayers. My experience has been that it is almost always right to bet against them when the consensus is the largest and the loudest.”

• And, he says sagely, as investors, we “always have to be aware of our innate and very human tendency to be fighting the last war.”

The combined take-away from these two books underscores one of the oldest pieces of financial advice, which is often ignored: Think before you move your money into stocks, bonds or any other investment.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 13, 2013, on page BU18 of the New York edition with the headline: Strategic Advice, Long Before You Invest.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/business/mutfund/in-two-new-books-strategic-advice-before-you-invest.html?ref=books&_r=0