I finished a great little book by Tuchman on my way back from Cincinnati last week: The Zimmerman Telegram. It covers the backstory behind the infamous telegram that precipitated US entry into WWI.

I knew the basics of the topic before I read the book, but I really hadn't known just how much meddling Imperial Germany had been up to in Mexico. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks they know this subject, but would like to know more.

Technorati Tags: WWI, history

I just finished one of the most melancholy books I've ever read: "The Proud Tower", by Barbara Tuchman. It's a study of society in the West during the time from 1890-1914 (i.e., the run up to WWI). It's not a history of the politics of that era, although it does touch on that in a few areas - notably, the rise of the anarchists, the rise of the socialists, and the decline (relative to the lower classes) of the British aristocracy.

However, that's not all that gets talked about. German music, in the person of Richard Strauss, gets a chapter. The evolution of the US in the post-frontier era comes out, through the eyes of an unreconstructed 19th century conservative, Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed. The peace movement and the two major peace conferences that took place - and the forces that arrayed against them.

I found the last chapter, titled "The Death of Jaures", the saddest section. Here you have the rising tide of working class power, coming up politically through the socialist parties in Europe. Some of the leaders of that movement had starry-eyed notions of an end to nationalism, and - via the unified action of labor across borders - the prevention of war. As Tuchman points out, French labor was French first, German labor was German first (and so on) - the dream of unified action without regard to borders was just that, a dream.

It's a great book, and I came away from it with a much better feel for that era. I also came away with a lot of skepticism about claims (regardless of where they come from) about how the world is "worse than ever". That notion seems to be a constant across all eras.

Technorati Tags: history

I just finished reading "A Shattered Peace", by David Andelman. It covers some of the same ground as "A Peace to end all Peace", but takes a wider scope. Andelman tries to look across the spectrum of problems that the Paris Peace Conference took on, and how they botched many of them.

To a large extent, I'd agree with Andelman's take - the diplomats there did botch the conference, and their attempt to divvy up the spoils of the war have saddled the world with many of the problems we see now. Without regard to your take on the middle east today, it's fairly easy to see that the map drawing and influence peddling of Lloyd George and George Clemanceau left us with a huge mess - and that Woodrow Wilson's incredible naivete about the world didn't help matters.

Andelman drives into the particulars though, and his analysis of many of them looks solid to me. The Balkans have only just recently recovered from the work of the Great Powers in 1919, and a ton of blood was shed in Asia (Vietnam, Korea, and China) over the course of the 20th century. Much of the bloodshed could have been avoided had the powers been more willing to let things go, but it just wasn't going to happen.

Where I disagree with Andelman is in his take on Russia. He thinks that outreach to the Bolsheviks in 1919 and 1920 could have made a difference; having read a fair bit about the raw paranoia and utopianism of Lenin and his crowd, I have my doubts. Reasoning with Lenin and Stalin then would have been as much of a fools errand as trying to reason with Robespierre in the 1790's - they were certain that they had the correct answers, and no outside thoughts were going to convince them otherwise. Here in the US, we were very fortunate to have Washington - a man who was willing to yield power. Neither France nor Russia were as lucky after their revolutions.

Beyond that though, I liked the book, and given the scope of the book, it's a minor quibble. I'd recommend it as a companion read to "A Peace to end all Peace".

Technorati Tags: WWI, history

I read "Your Inner Ceo", by Allan Cox, recently. When I first picked up the book, I kind of figured that it was another in an endless cycle of business books. However, I was pleasantly surprised by this short book. It's a quick, easy read, and doesn't try to be cute with lots of jargon.

What really got me engaged was the book's third chapter (titled "Facades"), where Cox explains the difference between where you say your company is heading and where it's actually heading. That just resonated with me; pretty much every place I've ever worked has had some level of cognitive dissonance between those two points - from my time as a teacher to my present work as Smalltalk Product Evangelist at Cincom.

I think that chapter alone would do a world of good for any manager willing to sit back and view himself (and his firm) objectively). If you're just a "worker bee" type in some large entity, you'll likely nod your head a lot while reading the book, even though most of the advice won't help you much in the "cog in the machine" situation. If, however, you are in any kind of position to make a difference, this book is well worth reflecting on.

Technorati Tags: business books, management

I just finished "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic", by Joseph J. Ellis. It was a book - like Wilentz' "American Democracy" - which I didn't want to see end.

It tells the story of the founding through a short series of vignettes:

• 1775 - 1776 - the point where things changed from a possibly fixable disagreement to a fight for independence
• Valley Forge - the experience that grounded Washington, and many of his officers, for the rest of their lives
• The argument over the type of government we would have in 1787
• The first treaty with the Indians - how good intentions came to nothing
• The founding of political parties - where we learn that paranoia over the motives of the opposition is hardly new
• The Louisiana Purchase - an action that violated Jefferson's theories of proper executive power, but which he could not let pass

Along the way, Ellis makes it very clear how the separation of powers made certain issues: slavery and Indian relations - difficult to deal with, because they were not amenable to easy compromises given the realities of the age. It's a very good book, and I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: America, history

I was intrigued by "The Discovery of France: a Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War" within minutes of stumbling on it at Borders a few weeks ago. It's a hopscotching exploration of France from the point of view of the French - how the center (Paris) was mostly ignorant about large parts of the country for a very long time. This is how the book opens:

One summer in the early 1740's, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc.

He was killed by suspicious villagers - who saw him as some kind of outside trouble with weird implements. The story bounces around a lot from there, but it held my interest all the way through: Graham Robb did a fine job connecting geography, language, and French history. An interesting point that I did not know: at the time of the French Revolution, French was almost certainly a minority language (at least, as it was spoken in Paris) within France. Makes me wonder how true that was of other parts of Europe, especially places (like Germany) that were politically disjoint at the time.

If you enjoy an exploration of history, language, and geography, this is a book you should add to your collection.

Technorati Tags: history, france

I haven't been reading many business books - if you look back over my "books" category, you'll see a lot of history, and very little else. However, I recently received a pre-release copy of Michael Port's "Beyond Booked Solid" - so I sat down and read it. It's a quick read, and it lays out a fairly easy to follow set of ideas for moving a business (primarily a service business) beyond the scope of what you can do yourself.

There's not a lot new in the book that you can't find elsewhere, but Port does keep it breezy and easy to follow. That's valuable all by itself, because even obvious messages are often overlooked. For instance: in a short section on hiring, he points out that you should keep attitude in mind when you hire. The right skills are important, but - keep in mind that you can train much, much more easily than you can change demeanor. Nothing earth shattering, but it did make me pause and look back over interview processes I've been involved in over the course of my career.

Another useful point made in that section, which far too few people pay attention to: Don't get caught up in the idea that "no one can do what you do". If you can delegate, and hire smart people to handle things, you'll leave yourself time to get into more of what you really want and need to do.

Overall, it's a nice fast read - I finished it in a couple of hours. That makes it a decent business read, because you don't need to slog through a lot of extraneous explanation to get to what Port is selling. Mostly, he's selling the idea that you need to figure out what you really want to do, and then map out systematically how you intend to get there. Obvious advice, perhaps, but - based on a lot of business situations I find myself in - advice that could stand to be passed around.

Technorati Tags: business books

I finished " The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln " by Sean Wilentz last week. It was a good book; I was unhappy to finish it (i.e., I wanted more).

Probably the most interesting part of the book for me was the period from Jackson to Buchanan: Wilentz does a great job of exploring and explaining the contradictory pulls of a wider franchise for white males (moving from landed property owners early on to nearly all non-felons later) and the rise of "master race" slavery theories in the south. The north was hardly immune from racism; it was more common for free blacks in the north to have the franchise in the first decade of the 1800's than it was by the 1850s.

Ultimately, those contradictions destroyed the Whigs, and split the Democrats between north and south. Wilentz shows something of an affectation for verbally equating Democracy and the Democratic party of that era, but he's clear about the problems within that party that took place from Jackson's time to the Civil War.

It's a great primer on that era, and Wilentz did an impressive amount of research on the presidential campaigns. Not as in depth as an exploration of a single election (like the last book I read), but very thorough - I have a much better feel for how the early US worked now than I did before I got this book.

Technorati Tags: history, US History, American History