Quarter Cannonball achievement unlocked! I am a huge fan of Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein story, so I was super intrigued by Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. I wasn’t disappointed by this retelling, some of it told from the monster’s point of view, but I’ll admit there were parts of the story that just didn’t grab me. Frankenstein in Baghdad is a darkly comic story of life in Baghdad during the years just after the US invasion of Iraq. It’s an English translation from the original Arabic, so I’m […]
Theocons and Privatizing War
I had just started my senior year of high school in September of 2001. I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch in front of the tv when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I went to school without really knowing what was going on, and in every class that day the teachers had the TVs on. I remember at lunch a classmate saying, “A whole lot of people are going to be dead, now.” My neighbors were Saudi and kept their kids home for […]
Army Chief of Staff Reading List #7
I looked forward to reading this book for a while. I really enjoyed another of the author’s books, The Generals, and its critical take on U.S. military leadership. Fiasco did not disappoint. Fiasco is the story of the early part of the Iraq War. There is a little background so that one understands the main players, namely Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, and then it jumps headfirst into a chronological discussion of the decisions made and their repercussions. Fiasco discusses how the war was basically preordained. The […]
Army Chief of Staff Reading List #1
I read this book because it entered the Army Chief of Staff reading list last year. The author, David Kilcullen, begins by discussing his qualifications and more importantly, declares his biases or specifically, the lack thereof. Kilcullen is an Australian and acknowledges that he is not registered to vote in the United States nor does he affiliate with any particular party’s politics. Books like this often seem politicized so it was refreshing for the author to be so candid. In Blood Year, he is highly […]