Walter Russell Mead

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Walter Russell Mead

The latest volume of Starr's magisterial history of California covers the post-World War II era, when California's prosperity and cultural exuberance astonished the world -- and when many of the seeds of the state's current travails were sown.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This brisk and accessible book summarizes the policies and controversies over U.S. immigration between 1892 and 1954, when Ellis Island was used to process immigrants to the United States and/or hold those scheduled for deportation.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This study of U.S. nation-building efforts in Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq both challenges and confirms Churchill's approach, where winning the war first was the most important task.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This well-researched and stimulating book makes an important addition to the growing literature that interprets U.S. foreign policy from a historical perspective.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Fleshler provides a moderate and nuanced view of the centrist and center-right organizations that dominate Jewish advocacy on Middle East issues, and his descriptions of their smaller but scrappy rivals on the left are useful, too.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Walter Russell Mead

In this stimulating book, Lowenthal looks at California's international interests and asks what Californians can do to advance them.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Gardels and Medavoy, two of California's most creative public intellectuals, bring a West Coast perspective to the role of culture in foreign policy.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This eminently readable and engaging biography of the richest man in the first hundred years of the United States' independence is a landmark study that significantly enhances one's understanding of U.S. economic history.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This detailed account of Harry Truman's role in the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel offers a useful and clear account of a complex chain of events.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Walter Russell Mead

With U.S. President Barack Obama confronting two foreign wars and the potential for more, this timely book by the noted American Civil War historian McPherson shows how Abraham Lincoln handled the pressures of a wartime presidency.

Review Essay
JUL/AUG
2009
Walter Russell Mead

A new book presents the complex and lively history of the evolution of U.S. power abroad.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Walter Russell Mead

In the Shadow of the Oval Office offers a timely retrospective on the role of national security adviser through 50 tumultuous years.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Faust's painstakingly researched account of the Civil War dead details how they died, what happened to their bodies, how families received the news, how they mourned, and how the North and the South memorialized the slain.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Walter Russell Mead

This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of American popular attitudes toward Islam from the eighteenth century onward.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Walter Russell Mead

David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, shows how President Barack Obama is the latest in a long line of U.S. leaders attempting to cope with problems that become more urgent and less tractable with every passing year.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Walter Russell Mead

The extended transition of power between presidential administrations is a unique feature of the U.S. political system -- and, Campbell and Steinberg argue in this comprehensive and useful guide, a serious vulnerability.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Readers looking for clues as to how the Obama administration might seek to reposition U.S. foreign policy could can consult this book for a wide-ranging and candid presentation of some of the principal themes in American political thought at this critical moment.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Under the brilliant editorship of Mathewes and Nichols, this chronologically arranged and thematically linked collection of essays looks at a tradition that extends from Puritan jeremiads to modern-day prophecies of doom, resulting an illuminating tour of American intellectual history that startles, provokes, and engages.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Trudeau brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the copious controversial literature on this subject to this book and takes readers in Sherman's footsteps on a day-by-day account of the march, using journals, newspapers, and other sources to re-create everything from the weather to the conflicting guesses among the Confederates and the Yankees about where, exactly, Sherman was headed.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2009
Walter Russell Mead

In a brilliant account of one of the oddest literary friendships in American history, Wineapple recounts the extraordinary story of two very different American writers: the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and the fiery abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2009
Walter Russell Mead

Was George W. Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson? That is the important question addressed by the four authors who created this short but lucid contribution to the U.S. foreign policy debate.