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Books & Reviews

Review Essays

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Review Essay,
May/June
2013
Bolívar's Botched BequestPremium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
Ilan Stavans

The Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolívar has a remarkably elastic legacy. Ever since his death in 1830, Latin American politicians across the political spectrum have claimed to be his rightful heir. What Bolívar left behind, it turns out, was less a coherent set of ideas than an abstract vision of Latin American unity -- a vision that remains impossible today.
Review Essay,
May/June
2013
The Persistence of Arab Anti-AmericanismPremium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
Marc Lynch

Anti-Americanism might have ebbed momentarily thanks to U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and support for the Arab Spring. But hostility is once again mounting in the Arab world. In Amaney Jamal's new book, she tries to determine why.
Review Essay,
Mar/Apr
2013
Castlereagh's CatechismPremium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
Brendan Simms

Foreign policy realists have long found inspiration in the ideas of Lord Castlereagh, who served as British foreign secretary during and after the Napoleonic Wars. A new biography of the statesman presents him as more ideological than is traditionally assumed, and suggests that his example is more relevant than ever -- and might even hold the key to solving Europe's ongoing crisis.

Capsule Reviews

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Capsule Review,
May/June
2013
Mau Mau’s Children: The Making of Kenya’s Postcolonial Elite
David P. Sandgren
Nicolas van de Walle

As a young college graduate, Sandgren taught in a rural Kenyan school for boys from 1963 to 1967 before returning to the United States for graduate school and a career in academia. Most of his pupils had been affected in some way by the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonizers in the 1950s. Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, many became part of the country’s first relatively well-educated indigenous elite and rose to prominence in government and business. Sandgren returned to Kenya in 1995 and interviewed 75 of the 90 or so students he had taught three decades earlier.
Capsule Review,
May/June
2013
The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010
Crawford Young
Nicolas van de Walle

In this political history of Africa since the 1950s, Young reviews the political science literature on such important issues as the legacy of colonialism, the reasons why African states turned autocratic soon after independence, and the best ways to assess their performance since then. Unlike similar books, Young’s considers the areas north and south of the Sahara, focusing on the political and diplomatic links between the two, as well as their common history.
Capsule Review,
May/June
2013
Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It
Morten Jerven
Nicolas van de Walle

Jerven demonstrates with devastating clarity that African governments produce imprecise economic statistics that should not be trusted. Based on his firsthand observations of a number of bureaucracies that issue economic statistics, Jerven paints a disturbing portrait of how sub-Saharan African governments devise their national accounts. Entire subsectors of some economies are not recorded, and others are assumed not to have changed in several decades. Data often reflect assumptions about production and consumption patterns that are questionable or even demonstrably false.

Foreign Affairs Books

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Foreign Affairs Books are collections of seminal essays which first appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs. Whether policy analysis, reportage or review essay each piece offers lasting value. Collectively these articles frame current debates over crucial issues in American foreign policy and world politics. You can find ordering information for Foreign Affairs Books on the individual book pages listed below.

Iran and the Bomb

Bringing together a broad range of important articles from Foreign Affairs and ForeignAffairs.com, Iran and the Bomb tells the story of the Islamic Republic of Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and the outside world's struggle to respond.

The Clash of Ideas

This special eBook collection drawn from the archives of Foreign Affairs traces, in real time, the great intellectual debates that defined the twentieth century—and are molding the twenty-first.

 
The U.S. vs. al Qaeda

Released to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, The US vs. al Qaeda offers a history of the War on Terror through three decades of the best Foreign Affairs coverage on the subject.