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Bookshelf: Liberty's Surest Guardian by Jeremi Suri

Notable Titles -- The United States
Article Summary and Author Biography

Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest, selects and reviews books on the United States for each issue of Foreign Affairs.

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Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest, selects and reviews books on the United States for each issue of Foreign Affairs.

From November/December 2011

 

 

Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama
Capsule Review, January 1, 2012
Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama
Walter Russell Mead

Suri’s core conclusion is sound: nation building is difficult, expensive, and unpleasant, and at best it can be only partially ­successful -- but it is often unavoidable.

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir
Capsule Review, January 1, 2012
Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir
Walter Russell Mead

Future chief justices would do well to read this book in preparation for their duties. The rest of us should thank Stevens for a lifetime of service and for the rarest kind of political book: a genuinely memorable memoir.

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
Capsule Review, January 1, 2012
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
Walter Russell Mead

This is a book that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street will both reject.

Hitler and America
Capsule Review, January 1, 2012
Hitler and America
Walter Russell Mead

Fischer gets so caught up with the complexities of the subject that he never manages to pull together an integrated portrait of Hitler’s view of the United States. As a result, this interesting and well-researched book never quite fulfills its potential.

The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History
Capsule Review, January 1, 2012
The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History
Walter Russell Mead

Except in its language, which is uniformly accessible and mercifully free of the jargon that plagues contemporary scholarship, this encyclopedia reflects the atmosphere and the concerns of the contemporary academic community as effectively as Diderot’s encyclopedia reflected the French Enlightenment.