Richard Gott
5.0 out of 5 stars Preliminary Review: Understanding the Trade-Offs & True Cost of Empire,December 8, 2011
I have ordered this book and am very much looking forward to providing readers (and myself, this is how I keep notes) with one of my more detailed reviews. The publisher is to be scolded for not using Inside the Book, one of Amazon's best features, and for failing to provide the best possible use of the Book Description and Editorial Reviews section. While the existing review is good and I have voted for it, it does not do this book justice. My decision to buy was based on the easily found review in The Guardian (UK) by Richard Drayton, “Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt by Richard Gott — review,” published 7 December 2011.
Where I am going to go with my review is toward an in-depth articulation of what has never been done before that I know of, an examination of the trade-offs of Empire and the opportunity costs of Epoch A hierarchical “rule by secrecy.” I have reviewed many books on Empire, Class War, Elite Rule, all easily found in master list online, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative). I also recommend the observe, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive).
Russell Ackoff would say that Empire represents centuries of doing the wrong thing righter–and at greater expense across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains. As we approach the Mayan calendar's start date for Epoch B, 12 December 2012, many of us are conscious that we must abandon old ways and rethink how we organize society. Occupy is a sympton of this – organized people against organized money, organized consciousness against organized violence.
I fully anticipate that this book will be a solid five, and perhaps even a six. In the interim, here are ten books that are the tip of the pyramid of books reviewed that I will bring to bear on this one. I cannot help but think of Lee Kuan Yew, Minister Mentor of Singapore and once called “the best Englishman in the Empire.” He resisted the Empire with subtlety and today Singapore is a jewel in the crown of Asia, not the crown of England. There are nuances here that Drayton, author of Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World, point out are not in this book–that may keep it at five but of all the books I considered buying this week, this one easily stands out as extraordinarily meaningful to all of us contemplating the combined crash of both the American Empire and the European Union.
More in a week. Nine other great books on this theme:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Edward Lansdale's Cold War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
