War and The American Presidency

This is a book that will forever contain, written with clutched pen and furrowed brow, some of the most annoyed annotations I have ever written. Beyond being boorish, repetitive, and for the most part not even well written, this book’s greatest fault was its inability to connect its scattered parts into any larger whole. I already have to read two other blogs for this class; I don’t need to be forced to stomach a third in printed form.  Rather than building much of a logical progression, the author just provides us with these segmented pieces of thoughts. And there are no sources! Some of the stuff is straightforwardly historical, so that’s fine or whatever, but what about the statement he makes on page 116 about how “the majority of the killing around the world is the consequence of religious disagreement”? That’s pretty bold. He says it because he wants to back up his statement that “terrorism…is the greatest current threat to civilization.” But…he just doesn’t prove that. As far as I can tell, the man just pulled that statement out of his ass, and I found it really off-putting. (Especially since I just went to this lecture by this Islamic studies scholar where he showed all these UN charts about how terrorism, religious and non-religious both, only accounted for 1/500 murders worldwide. And most of those were Iraq/Afghanistan [and thus war] related. Even accounting for religious persecution doesn’t make this statement any more viable. Is he counting every cultural conflict as a religious one? Look, I’ll stop harping on this now, but this statement is where he really lost me.)

            What is everyone else seeing in this thing that I’m missing? The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune…everyone had these glowing things to say about it. *4/28/11 - remainder of paragraph edited out for politeness' sake.*

            K, well. I have to give this book a thesis. Now that I’m looking at it again, I guess he states one at the beginning. Or he at least states his purpose in writing this book. (which is…almost the same.) I just forgot about it as it went along because most of the stuff he talked about wasn’t relevant. Schlesinger Jr. wrote War and the American Presidency because American’s aren’t a tabula rasa, and he wanted to give a historical background for the US-led invasion of Iraq. But, as previously stated, it just provided him with a license to talk about whatever he wanted. Like that chapter about the Electoral College. (the majority of CH 5) Or that bit about how Truman and Roosevelt were sub-par historians. (P 124)

            So, Schlesinger’s goal was to “supply the historical background for current controviersies in the hope that history might throw some light on choices that are ours, or at least our masters’, to make.” Feeling that no light was shed? I personally assert that he failed. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this book anymore, especially after writing that seven-page revenge essay, so I’ll just end by saying something nice: it was quick and easy to read, and it gave me something to do on a really long plane ride besides watch an insipid romantic comedy.