The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era.
By Michael Mandelbaum
PublicAffairs, 2010, 282 Pages.
We are now deep enough into the 21st century that its chroniclers have already recalibrated its turning-point date. No longer is it September 11, 2001, but September 15, 2008 – the day of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the official advent of the Great Global Recession.
The Dirty and Dangerous Details of Nuclear Technology Smuggling
Peddling Peril
By David Albright
Free Press, 2010, 254 Pages
Reviewed by Kurt Moss
This account of the global clandestine traffic of nuclear-weapons technology is written by David Albright (no relation to Madeline), one of the most knowledgeable American experts on proliferation. Albright minces no words about his conviction that the most dangerous threat today to international security is the threat of nuclear weapons falling into “the wrong hands:” terrorists, criminals or irresponsible governments. He is equally clear about what needs to be done in self-defense against this threat. Western democracies and their allies should not rely on pre-emptive military action as their first line of defense against nuclear-armed rogues. Instead, Albright argues that Western democracies and other responsible governments should make it a security imperative to combat the global nuclear smuggling that is spreading this weapons technology amid comparative indifference to this particular dangerous threat.
Gaullist Modernization France had some Seminal Roots in Much-Reviled Third Republic and Vichy – A Revisionist View
France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era
By Philip Nord
Princeton University Press, 2010, 383 pages.
Reviewed by Jennifer Wnuk
Even Charles de Gaulle, almost universally hailed as the savior of modern France, is subject to the revisionist diligence of Philip Nord, a Harvard historian who has written a meaty book challenging some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of France’s postwar modernization.
The Global Lingua Franca is Globish, Which is NOT English -- And Never Will Be
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
By Robert McCrum.
W.W. Norton & Co, 352 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Mosettig
When you Google for the source of the oft-quoted aphorism that "English is the easiest language to speak badly," the answer quickly pops up: George Bernard Shaw. This lead sentence of mine incarnates the theme of this book on the spread of English as the world's default language. In my sentence, a corporate name, Google, becomes one of the most widely used verbs in the lexicon. And that particular corporation is the symbol of the exploding worldwide web and communications technology that expresses itself in English.
America Winning New Cultural War For Global Audiences - Europe Lags In Producing Widely Accessible “Products”
America has opened a lead that will perhaps not be overtaken in the global market for “cultural exports” in the form of digital materials – the movies and music, books and broadcasting and all the other media that shapes global consumers’ taste in entertainment and their view of the world they live in.
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