Sunday, October 22, 2006
Book notes
I've been reading up a storm, what with all the time on airplanes, but not writing much about what I have read. A few notes are in order.
I finished Lawrence Wright's book on al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
I have also just (mostly) finished Marshall University Professor Stephen D. Cooper's Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers As the Fifth Estate
Watching the Watchdog
I have also purchased a huge number of books in the last few days largely on the basis of (i) judging the book by its cover, or (ii) some blogger's recommendation. Of those (which I will link below), I am already half through Mark Steyn's must-read, hilarious, depressing book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
September 11, 2001, was not "the day that everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10, how many journalists had the Council on American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offense to Muslims would be the early twenty-first century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
This book is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world, including the United States, Canada and beyond. The key factors are:
- Demographic decline
- The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state
- Civilizational exhaustion
Steyn focuses particularly on the Islamization of Western Europe. In a definite way, America Alone is the North American partner to Melanie Phillips' Londonistan
, which I have previously recommended. The two books make an excellent pair, Phillips focusing more on social and political concessions to Islamists in the name of multiculturalism, and Steyn looking at the collapsing fertility of non-Muslim Europeans and the resulting decline in the geopolitical power of the affected countries (hence, America "alone").Other books I have bought in the last few days -- and will attempt to read this fall -- include:
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
. Buruma's book, which will probably be the next I read, seems to be about a topic that I have written about on many occasions. Buruma is a smart guy, and I suspect that his book deserves attention.Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today
. Boot's book was only published Friday, but I learned of it from an "in the mail" link at Instapundit and jumped on it right away. Boot's last book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, was excellent, and sufficient advertising for the new one.Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
. From the Booklist synopsis:Ferguson's broadest work to date, this sprawling book folds the author's previous theories of empire and economics into an international history of twentieth-century violence. What went wrong with modernity, he asks, such that the Fifty Years War from 1904 to 1953 could be the bloodiest in history, and why did so much violence happen at particular times (such as the early 1940s) and particular places (such as eastern Europe)? To the common answers of ethnic conflict and economic volatility, Ferguson adds, perhaps unsurprisingly, the decline of empires. Consistent with Empire and Colossus, the problem was frequently that the empires of the twentieth century were too strong not to fight, but that they were too weak, as illustrated by an analysis of Britain's reluctance to intervene in Germany before 1939. Coupled with ubiquitous and persistent notions of racial superiority and the ill-fitting contours of nation-states, the borderlands of empires--Manchuria, Poland, the Balkans--became the killing fields of the twentieth century. In chronicling what he labels the "descent of the West," Ferguson challenges many scholars on many fronts, and deploys a broad spectrum of sources--from war novels to population data to his perennial attention to the bond markets. His ultimate conclusion--that the War of the World was the suicide of the West--is tinged with regret about what might have been, and perhaps even a Gibbon-esque anxiety about the coming Asian century.
There were several others, but it is late, I have to get up early, and this was enough to keep you busy for a few days.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Oct 23, 03:15:00 AM:
With regard to demographic decline. I read an article the other day (I cannot remember where) where the US was compared favorably to the EU countries. Our birth rate is higher. While the article emphasized that in the EU what births do occur are more likely to be in the Muslim community, it did not break out the births in the US. I wonder how much of our better birthrate is attributable not to Muslims but our migrant population, be it legal or illegal.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Mon Oct 23, 07:12:00 AM:
I have some statistics on that from Mark Steyn's book which I will cough up if I can find them. The short version is that the birth rate among white women in the red states is higher than anywhere else in the developing world, and the net effect in the U.S. is pretty good (for those of us who believe that population growth is essential).
I will add that I am not among those who worry about the Hispanic peril. I'll take our Catholic Mexicans over the UK's Pakistanis and France's Algerians any day of the week. But you already know that I'm a bit of a "dove" on the immigration issue.
By , at
Mon Oct 23, 11:38:00 AM:
Pardon if this is a repeat - couldn't tell if the first went through. But one drawback of living in a liberal college town, pardon the redundancy, is the tendency of the public library to avoid some books. The Princeton PL has ten copies of Woodward's book, two of Obama's, four of Franken's latest, NONE of Mark Steyn's new offering. This is not necessarily intentional censorship, just institutional bias and a genuine reaction to supply and demand. Anyway, I've requested Steyn's book on the PPL web site - might help if someone else would do the same.
Thanks
By Ken McCracken, at
Tue Oct 24, 06:34:00 AM:
Savage Wars of Peace!
You are the only other guy I know who has read it, and I just say that because I heartily recommend it to everyone.
Fascinating history by Max Boot of the many little mostly-forgotten wars in American history.
Kinda fills in all the neglected spaces between the big wars.
