chrismealy: 2007/09

"The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans"

The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans by William R. Everdell.

I've been trying to remember what led me to read this. After spending half an hour messing around with Google I think it's because Everdell reviewed A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, which I read earlier this summer, so maybe that's how I made the connection. But I've also been also working my way to reading Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village because I heard a conversation between its author Daniel Deudney and Michael Lind, and it cites the Everdell book. It's strange to not know why I reserved a book from the library and read it, but there you have it.

Anyway, what did I learn from The End of Kings? Where to start! Plenty! Before if I thought of it all, I'd trace democracy from Athens, maybe Rome, to the Magna Carta, and then the Declaration of Independence. But there have been plenty of Republics before America's: Switzerland, Florence and other Italian cities, John Calvin's Geneva, the United Provinces of the Dutch republic, Cromwell's Commonwealth, and a few others. But more than that there's been a tradition of republican thinking since antiquity. America's founders had all read Plutarch's Lives and Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and a whole bunch of other books nobody hears about anymore.

"Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA"

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Have you ever worked for a big horrible bureaucratic company? Maybe a big company that couldn't do anything right and was slowly going out of business? That's the CIA. If it wasn't for the cold war and 9/11 it would have gone out of business. And business is that? Toppling governments. Off the top of my head, in these countries: Japan, France, Italy, South Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Congo, Chile ... and that's without looking. There are others. Not that they ever had any idea that their new government would be better. CIA has been blundering about from the start, half the time driving America's foreign policy and forcing our elected government to deal with the mess. So presidents have come and gone, and aside from George HW Bush every one of them from Truman on has alternated between trusting the CIA too much and ignoring them completely.

The book is a hoot, and since I don't really know much about the period from 1945 to 1988 it sure filled in a lot of the gaps.