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Regime change
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Stephen Kinzer Tantor Media, $39.99 14.5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1400102391
Recipe for instability
By Thomas E. Ricks Penguin Audio, $39.95 10 hours abridged, CD ISBN 0143059068
The tale of a tail
By Chris Anderson Hyperion Audiobooks, $39.98 8 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1401384145
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More than 200 years ago, British statesman Edmund Burke said, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." A wise observation that still holds today. One wonders what might have happened—or not happened—if our current leaders had taken a cue from Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer's well-researched, fascinating history of the last 110 years of American foreign intervention. Kinzer focuses on only "the most extreme cases," 14 in all, where the U.S. "arranged to depose foreign leaders." Our century of regime change began in Hawaii in 1893, picked up momentum and support with the Spanish-American War, continued on to Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile and Iran among others, and now finds us in Iraq. It's all described here in measured prose, mirrored by Michael Prichard's straightforward, newscaster delivery. Seeing these events as a continuum offers the perspective of history with its sad repetitions and sobering conclusions.
The war in Iraq is the sole focus of Thomas E. Ricks' essential bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, read by James Lurie. Senior Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post, Ricks doesn't beat around the bush, as it were; this "overthrow," he states, was "launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation." He backs up this indictment with devastating, mesmerizing detail, drawn from extensive interviews with American military personnel and more than 30,000 pages of official documents. It results in a powerful narrative that dissects what has become a tragedy, "a tragedy in which every major player contributed to the errors," where the "heroes tend to be anonymous and relatively powerless"—front-line American soldiers and Iraqi civilians trying to care for their families. "They are the people who pay every day for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions." Sad and sobering indeed.
In this world of broadband connectivity, mainstream isn't mainstream any more—there are accessible alternatives everywhere and choice seems infinite. What this means for business—and what it says about our culture and the way it's evolving—is explored and explained by Wired editor Chris Anderson in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More read here by Christopher Nissley. It used to be true that 20 percent of goods accounted for 80 percent of sales. But now the bloom is off the blockbuster and the next big thing is small—the many, many niche sales that are driving the emerging digital market. You might feel a little discombobulated as Anderson spins out the more radical changes, but things move fast in our brave new world.