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Books & Reviews

Review Essays

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Review Essay,
Jul/Aug
2013
Lesser IsraelPremium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
Jeffrey Goldberg

As two new books detail, Israel's ultra-Orthodox community has formed a partisan bloc able to manipulate the country's political system even as it makes little effort to hide its contempt for secular democracy. But it is not too late for Israeli centrists to push back.
Review Essay,
Jul/Aug
2013
The Second Great Depression Premium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
J. Bradford DeLong

The global economic downturn is hardly over, and without a more dramatic set of actions, the United States is likely to suffer another major crisis in the years ahead. A new book by Alan Blinder may be the best general volume on the recession to date, but it paints an overly optimistic portrait of the current situation.
Review Essay,
Jul/Aug
2013
The Myth of the Omnipotent Central BankerPremium Article available to subscribers and site license holders.
Adam S. Posen

Central bankers have always carried a mystique far beyond justification, whether they are cast as malicious, incomprehensible, or all-powerful. Neil Irwin's new book on monetary policy during the financial crisis should dispel these myths once and for all.

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.