Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ
In The Passage of Power, Robert Caro shows that LBJ’s brilliance as a politician lay not in his idealism but his opportunism.
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle
How Charles de Gaulle’s story became a collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in.
Sep 12, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
Grand Flattery: The Yale Grand Strategy Seminar Grand Flattery: The Yale Grand Strategy Seminar
Why are Yale and other top universities teaching a Grand Strategy seminar if the conditions that seemed to call for grand strategizing no longer exist?
May 9, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms.
Apr 10, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
Getting to Denmark: On Francis Fukuyama Getting to Denmark: On Francis Fukuyama
The Origins of Political Order, a work of total world history, pits the old Fukuyama against the new.
Oct 5, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss
With a sharp eye for cultural patterns and a keen feel for the shape of a story, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a poet in the laboratory of anthropology.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney