Here's the final Summer Reading List, a broad, eclectic, and thoughtful collection. Thanks very much for sharing a bit of your seasonal reading with the group.

An Elephant for Aristotle by L. Sprague de Camp

Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change by Michael Vlahos

“The U.S. Army’s Future Force Capstone Concept”

Tides of War by Steven Pressfield

Number: The Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Modern Industrial Progress by Charles H. Cochrane

Titan by Ron Chernow

Wired for War by P.W. Singer

Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Amsterdam, Saturday, and Atonement by Ian McEwan

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye

“La « guerre à la terreur » est-elle la « mère de toutes les guerres” by Alain Chouet

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan

Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution and The Individualized Corporation by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett

The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg

Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Shona Brown

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe

The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen

Boone by Robert Morgan

Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Battle for Europe, 1520-1536 by James Reston, Jr.

The 9/11 Commission Report

The WMD Commission Report

American Lion by Jon Meacham

Strokes of Genius by L. Jon Wertheim

The Test of our Times by Tom Ridge with Lary Bloom

Captain "Hell Roaring" Mike Healy: From American Slave to Arctic Hero byDennis Noble and Truman Stobridge

Rescue Warriors by David Helvarg

Martin Murphy, Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: The Challenge of Piracy.

Steven Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.

David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla.

Timothy Challans, Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare.

Richard Koenigsberg, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust, and War.

Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

Dennis Meadows, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse.

Fred Pearce, Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change.

Nevra Necipoglu, Byzantium Between the Ottomans and the Latins.

Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective.

Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman route to State Centralization.

Richard Hodges, The Rise and Fall of Byzantine Butrint.

Julia Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000.

James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History.

Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Updated at 8:58 a.m. on Sept. 4.

Honestly: This has been my July-August reading. But there are several flavors here, colorations and sensations from very different stations on the smorgasbord of knowledge. Think of these are five tranches — “slices” as the French would say — in our compass of thought.

Martin Murphy, Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: The Challenge of Piracy.

Steven Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.

David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla.

Timothy Challans, Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare.

Richard Koenigsberg, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust, and War.

Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

Dennis Meadows, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse.

Fred Pearce, Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change.

Nevra Necipoglu, Byzantium Between the Ottomans and the Latins.

Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective.

Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman route to State Centralization.

Richard Hodges, The Rise and Fall of Byzantine Butrint.

Julia Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000.

James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History.

Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

My first tranche is in the here-and-now: The world of insurgents and the non-state — the world that the United States can seem neither to handle nor let go. Martin Murphy’s magisterial work on piracy is absolutely essential reading: Judicious, comprehensive, and packed with insight. Steve’s essay on the intimate and yet ongoing relationship between America and Iraq has the compelling virtue of forcing us to see this story for what it really is: Not a narrative of actions and outcomes, of policy narratives between us and the distant “them,” but rather of relationships we were unwilling to see. Dave Kilcullen offers — unconsciously surely — a dilemma. His argument works artlessly against itself, as he defends Counterinsurgency’s “secret recipe” while also eloquently arguing for its essential and counterproductive futility.

The next tranche speaks to new philosophical perspectives on war, even a new lexicon, idiom, taxonomy of human conflict. Tim Challans’ essay is a call to inner awakening: an altogether urgent and much needed passage of recognition. Namely: That war is an expression — and thus an enduring judgment — of who we are, and that those who we anoint to fight must truly represent our inmost selves.

Richard Koenigsberg represents an entirely orthogonal and de novo vantage on war. His academic lens is Psychology, and he has penetrated to a still-obscured truth of war in Modernity: That it is in essence the sacrificial — and thus transcendental — celebratory vessel of all human sacred identity. His essay is in its way a call-to-arms: To see at last our own buy-in culturally to a boundlessly destructive essence within our own humanity.

The third tranche represent efforts to address the synergy in physical “trends and shocks” awaiting us in the global environment. The Meadows’ philippic is in its way an apologia (if an apologetic philippic is even possible!) for their famous/infamous Club of Rome original Limits to Growth. Two dimensions to this 1990’s volume stand out. First — even if published in the Clinton-Phat era of “Good Times” — its projections for collapse (overshoot) look pretty right on, right now. Second, their model is still far too “hydraulic.” They do not even try to model human cultural response to the crisis of “overshoot.” But human response is what will save us — or not.

Mark Lynas and Fred Pearce, in contrast, are “humble journalists.” But they nonetheless both do a superb job of synthesizing where we think we are in our collective — and authoritative scientific — thinking about the consequences of impending global climate change. Six Degrees especially makes a compelling case for a real possibility that we in fact — right now — face the worst: And that this could indeed be the human future.

The fourth tags my still-dogged pursuit of the shifts in consciousness that drive history. Human transformations are expressed as migrations of identity, and what better way to see this than through the fieldwork of earlier cultures, available to us as prefiguration of our own future. The Byzantine-to-Ottoman transformation is especially compelling — and universally misunderstood. These thoughtful works by Necipoglu and Barkey help to show the intermediative conversation that created the successor empire to the Romaioi: Not a Turkish, but rather a wholly familiar universalistic vision that was still at its identity-heart, Byzantine.

To this point, a small archaeological beauty — The Rise and Fall of Byzantine Butrint — reveals to us achingly human, and granular textural continuities between Roman and Byzantine: Though a thousand years of change and upheaval. It is an intimate portrait of human adaptation and survival. It has much to tell us about our own near future.

Julia Smith and James O’Donnell bookend today’s almost hidden debate on: What happened? Why did “Rome” fall, or did it fall at all? I say, hidden, because what really happened at Antiquity’s end was not after all a fall but rather the subsidence and decompression of Greco-Roman globalization and its civilizational forms. O’Donnell understandably highlights the perverse role of the Late Roman state (Justinian) in promoting the Grand Subsidence. Yet this somehow remains a conventional narrative — as Dan Byman's comment suggests — which leaves out the larger, bigger transformations that necessarily attend the waning of an epoch.

Finally, Max Brooks World War Z — the first novel I have read in years — drags us gasping to the tremulous pulse of today’s American zeitgeist: Apocalyptic, eschatological, millenarian.

Zombies are proof (Do you need more? Scoff and show yourself fatally disconnected!) that the not-so-subtle undercurrent in our nation today is anxiety and apprehension.

National consciousness is falling back (at least in literary terms) on its collective revivalist-awakening roots: even if these do not take a sectarian religious form. It doesn’t matter: the unease is there.

Why else would Hollywood tease us unmercifully with the movie 2012, and its promise of the cleansing of a flood?

So what are zombies anyhow? The original Night of the Living Dead was a late-1960s homage to the end of excess, the end of the “Greening of America” — a Zombie finger-wagging cautionary tale.

But today — especially through the harsh-sensitive felicity of Brooks — Zombies are a clairvoyant instantization of a future so near to Americans that they can smell it, so horrifying that they have no coping mechanism save the zombie metaphor. Tell me what will happen when Bird Flu — not Swine Flu — grips America. Can you?

But going even further, Zombie novels today — of which Brooks is certainly the best — are also a barometer speaking — “through caverns measureless to Man” — to enduring sub-currents in our American ethos: That will tap into the deepest sources of survival when and if things get really bad. World War Z in this sense is a traditional literary charge: Are you American enough to survive?

[It is another testament to the contemporary power of American apocalyptic that World War Z is the first book on the new Naval War College President’s book club — and it is a hit! From what I hear, it has sparked a truly resonant conversation among those who have been and done — multiple times, in faraway lands!]

So do you still not believe? Try reading David Cook’s works on apocalyptic literature in the 7th century: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. Remember James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds?” People are sensing now about what lies ahead. We should listen to them.

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of traveling throughout Alaska with several leaders from the Obama Administration to meet with local communities and see firsthand the challenges and opportunities emerging in an increasingly accessible Arctic region. The first night of this trip we were honored with a potluck dinner by the community of Nome Alaska. It was remarkable to see and hear from them just how impactful the Coast Guard, through its predecessor the U.S. Revenue Marine, has been in this region. This trip coincided with Operation Arctic Crossroads, a multi-agency initiative to provide medical, optometry, veterinarian, boating safety awareness and other community services to communities throughout northern Alaska. As I walked the town of Shismaref with its Mayor and saw the needs of its people being met by the volunteers from the Army and Air Force (Active, Reserve, and Guardsmen), Public Health Service and Coast Guard; I couldn’t help but reckon back to the era of Captain “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, who for the last two decades of the 19th Century, was the United States Government in most of Alaska. In his twenty years of service between San Francisco and Point Barrow, he acted as: judge, doctor, and policemen to Alaskan natives, merchant seamen and whaling crews. It is from this perspective that I recommend Captain "Hell Roaring" Mike Healy: From American Slave to Arctic Hero, by Dennis Noble and Truman Stobridge. You can read a more detailed review of this book on my blog.

Additionally, over the last couple of years we provided unprecedented access to Author David Helvarg. While researching and writing "Rescue Warriors," David Helvarg made numerous deployments with Coast Guard men and women around the globe as part of the Coast Guard Authors Program. This included deploying on rescue missions, participating in relief missions after hurricanes, conducting law enforcement and security patrols and spending time overseas with Coast Guard forces supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. He interviewed Coast Guardsmen from the newest recruits to the most senior leaders in the service as well as other governmental leaders, members of Congress and representatives of the maritime community. His book is a comprehensive look at the Coast Guard, our people and our organizational character and has some interesting discussion regarding our challenges and opportunities in the present and future. You can listen to an interview with the author discussing the book and the Coast Guard.

I've been trying to tackle a variety of reads over the August time frame. I have been slogging through the Andrew Jackson biography "American Lion" by Jon Meacham which is a great look at a somewhat unappreciated giant of American history. However, it got interrupted by a casual book, Strokes of Genius, about the Federer-Nadal 2008 Wimbledon final - although the mental strategies employed by both men to combat the other and the elements are worthy of more attention than the average sports match. And today, I got my copy of The Test of Our Times by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, under whom I served at DHS. I'm hoping to finish both before Congress returns next week.

http://www.americansecurityproject.org/theflashpointblog/evelyn-farkas/2009/08/18/afghan-election-prelude-the-taliban-they-put-him-though-a-wheat-thresher/

This week -- for a few days at least, because it is a fast read -- i'm reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second book by Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American author of The Kite Runner. the book, focusing on the plight of one woman in Afghanistan is an especially timely choice, given recent elections in Afghanistan and today's Washington Post article by Pamela Constable on the worsening situation for Afghan women. The book tells the story of Miriam, an illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat man -- her powerlessness at the hands of men, including her father who betrayed her by marrying her off rather than sending her to school, as she wished, along with her legitimate half-sisters. Then there is her husband who buys her a burka and forbids her from associating with the liberal professor's wife. I've already had enough of his onion and stale cigarette breath.

Reading this book may also serve as a reminder that things are still better in Afghanistan today than they were before 2002. And the Afghans I asked about a week ago all agreed. Countering this miserable story (I'm guessing it gets even more miserable...) is the true-life example of Dr. Humayra Haqmal, Chairmwoman of the Movement of Afghan Sisters (MAS), who I mention and quote in my Afghan election blog on the ASP website - see link above. She's Kabul University-educated and determined to empower Afghan women. If she can keep recruiting insightful men with Khaled Hosseini's sensibilities, if there are enough of them out there, there will be opportunities to lessen the misery.

Just a quick note to transmit the summer reading list, as it stands now. Many of you have recommended several titles and have provided the group with compelling synopses of why you think these make for good reading. So far we have 32 recommendations from 14 experts.

An Elephant for Aristotle by L. Sprague de Camp

Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change by Michael Vlahos

“The U.S. Army’s Future Force Capstone Concept”

Tides of War by Steven Pressfield

Number: The Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Modern Industrial Progress by Charles H. Cochrane

Titan by Ron Chernow

Wired for War by P.W. Singer

Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Amsterdam, Saturday, and Atonement by Ian McEwan

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye

“La « guerre à la terreur » est-elle la « mère de toutes les guerres” by Alain Chouet

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan

Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution and The Individualized Corporation by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett

The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg

Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Shona Brown

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe

The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen

Boone by Robert Morgan

Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Battle for Europe, 1520-1536 by James Reston, Jr.

The 9/11 Commission Report

The WMD Commission Report

I have tried to mix the summer reading up a little this year -- pleasure with a little business. Sadly, the business seems to be overwhelming the lot.

As usual, I indulged in my history and biography. The book "Boone" by Robert Morgan was a fascinating character study of an American legend. Morgan did a nice job of breaking down the man and his flaws without dismissing the greatness of his explorations and his courage on a still very raw frontier.

I equally enjoyed "Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Battle for Europe, 1520-1536 " by James Reston, Jr. What a bloody set of battles that was -- our last major encounter with the Muslim world before the current action. Certainly a great primer on why southeastern Europe remains the cauldron of trouble it is today.

As for business, I went back and read both the 9/11 Commission report and the WMD report. I did this for the simple reason that I wanted to zero base my understanding of our current state of intelligence in the U.S.

Bottom line: I think the DNI and the process by which intelligence is collected and distributed at all levels is so fundementally flawed that we in endangering America. The likelihood of another intelligence failure along the lines of 9/11 is a virtual certitude. The system must be reworked from the ground up. I am looking to see who is willing to join in this arduous and crucial effort.

One often-overlooked fact about the Goldwater-Nichols Act was that its congressional authors adapted management practices from the private sector to fix our armed forces. At PNSR, we look for unconventional ideas to solve seemingly intractable problems in government. All these books below provided us with perspectives that challenged our thinking and informed our work. Through our work, we know that government has vast, but untapped, potential to solve today’s hardest national security problems.

In Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan gives a tour d’ horizon of perspectives on organizations. From Marxist denunciation of industrial bureaucracy to companies resembling organic cell-structures, we learn about different ways people have experienced working with others. In government, we are all familiar with the fiefdoms in our bureaucracy, but we can also find agile teams of military and intelligence operators in the field. This book helps place these government experiences in fascinating new light.

Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett coauthored Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, which provides a management model for organizations that have worldwide interests. Many companies today have gone global, and they face problems similar to government, including people “going native,” out-of-touch decisions from headquarters, and fighting between regional and functional divisions. The solution, as the authors found through hundreds of interviews, is to build reward systems that promote the sharing of capabilities, resources, and people among organizational units. The book provides examples of cross-divisional teams into which divisions contribute valuable resources to achieve mutual gain. We envision Interagency Teams flourishing in a 21st Century national security system.

(Another excellent book by the same authors is The Individualized Corporation)

As we manage the challenges of a security environment that seems faster, more complex, and unpredictable, in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Henry Mintzberg explains the folly of stale strategic planning processes of companies like General Motors in the 1960s that churned out dense gosplans based on projections of a future that never came about. Mintzberg denounces a tendency among strategic planners in bureaucracies to control their organizations too much, ultimately proving counterproductive.

In our last book, we find an alternative: Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, Kathleen Eisenhardt and Shona Brown, a Google executive, which is based on more than a hundred interviews and the application of recent theoretical research on complex adaptive systems to organizations. They propose an approach to strategy based on innovation, which comes from scanning the horizon, breaking the organization down into flexible semi-structures, and establishing a tempo for change. Most importantly, the leadership would cultivate a collaborative environment that gives way to spontaneous and novel behavior that can be exploited to renew the strength and viability of the organization. Our government needs to learn strategic management so it can confront a broader range of complex challenges and to do so faster.

(Other books that we found helpful were Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, for averting Black Swans, and The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen, which offered rich examples of shockingly inventive and resourceful organizations.)

I've just re-read the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ok, I know it's not "lite" summer reading but I do think that even as we turn ourselves into pretzels politically in this country over healthcare and CIA investigations, and words like "Nazi" and "anti-American" are thrown around with casual ease at town meetings and the like, it's good to remind ourselves from time to time what true totalitarianism looks like, and that we need to do whatever we can to prevent it.

“How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower,” By Adrian Goldsworthy.

oldsworthy’s book is a superb account of the last three centuries of the Roman empire. His thesis is that Rome’s fall was due to its internal weakness, particularly the near-constant civil wars that plagued the empire. Over time, this consumed the army and made it difficult for Rome to marshal its resources against invaders. Goldsworthy displays a mastery of the complexity of the time, but he conveys it to the reader in a clear and even exciting manner. He is particularly good at letting the reader know when he is discussing established fact, speculation of scholars based on limited evidence, and his own opinions. I am always leery of drawing parallels between history, particularly ancient history, and the U.S. position in the world today, and it is pleasing that Goldsworthy avoids facile comparisons.

Thanks to those who’ve shared your summer readings lists. It’s an eclectic collection that reflects the wide range of interests among our experts. Please keep your suggestions coming, and update us on any works that you’ve finished or on any titles you pick up at the suggestion of fellow experts. For your convenience, I’ve collected the titles you’ve mentioned and provided links to sites where you can read or purchase them.

On a separate note, with the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy, National Journal has published a collection of reminiscences provided by those who knew and worked with the senator over his long career. You can read those here.

Summer reading list:

An Elephant for Aristotle by L. Sprague de Camp

Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change by Michael Vlahos

“The U.S. Army’s Future Force Capstone Concept”

Tides of War by Steven Pressfield

Number: The Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Modern Industrial Progress by Charles H. Cochrane

Titan by Ron Chernow

Wired for War by P.W. Singer

Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Amsterdam, Saturday, and Atonement by Ian McEwan

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye

“La « guerre à la terreur » est-elle la « mère de toutes les guerres” by Alain Chouet

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

I find self serving autobiographies and political science current affairs books to be boring however profitable they may be for the authors and publishers.

General education and idle reading are not in vogue, but I continue to try to remember old and amusing books and to re-read them amidst the daily effort.

I have been re-reading, "An elephant for Aristotle." by L Sprague de Camp.

I'm working on fellow blogger Michael Vlahos' magesterial Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. It makes my head hurt, but in a good way--one of the most important things I've read for many years. Doctrine wise, I'm poring through a draft of the new U.S. Army Capstone Concept which is amazingly good. Hammock reading is Steven Pressfield's fantastic Tides of War (having earlier finished his Gates of Fire and The Virtues of War.)

How Government Thinks Stinks

Here is America’s problem in a nutshell. Washington does not think very well. The last quarter century has seen an explosion in the human capacity to create and manipulate new knowledge. Despite that fact, the instruments used to inform public policy choices are as creaky as ever. Washington makes policy largely by intuition. I don’t even blame politics. People are so overwhelmed they just go with their gut. So I have spent a lot of thinking about how do you make high quality decisions fitting the right question, to the right data set to answer the question, to the right method to look at the data…that means looking at a whole bunch of different qualitative and quantitative methods…including looking at one our most fundamental tools—math. Tobias Dantzig’s classic Number: The Language of Science is a must read, one of Einstein’s favorite books, it explains how we use math to think. Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea explains how the idea of “nothing” is at the center of how we think about everything. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives shows how screwed-up our thinking is about the concepts of chance and probability. These are books about math for people like me who still count on their fingers.

Over the last several years I have become convinced that one of the biggest threats to our national security is the decline of an industrial base once dubbed "the arsenal of democracy." It is a source of constant amazement to me that huge trade deficits, the near-collapse of the auto industry, and other obvious signs of industrial decay elicit so little concern from the policy community. I have recently released a report on the same subject -- "Reversing Industrial Decline" -- which is available at the Lexington Institute website.

Anyway, my interest in the slackening sinews of America's industrial muscle strongly influences what I read. The next book I will read after I return from a brief detour to Rome will be Charles H. Cochrane's "Modern Industrial Progress," a survey of American industry published by the J.B. Lippincott Company in December of 1904. This is just the most recent in a series of readings I have undertaken that include the 1937 memoirs of a young man who worked in Edison's laboratory and some remisicences written by George Brown in 1910 about the early oil industry in Pennsylvania.

What I am trying to do in reading these books is recapture the spirit of innovation and industry that prevailed in the popular culture when America first rose to industrial dominance in the decades following the Civil War. Ron Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller, "Titan," although a modern treatment, is especially effective in capturing the ethos of the day. I know -- this isn't what national-security types are supposed to be reading. But after teaching defense topics and writing about them for 30 years, there isn't much about the military I read these days that seems truly new to me. Besides, I need a break from all those government reports.

So here's my deep, dark secret: I HATE summer. As an Alaskan, I basically lay under the bed and pant from when the cherry blossoms depart until the dog days are past. So while I'm sitting in the dark counting dust bunnies, I really do read national security tomes.

Right now, I'm reading two. The fun one is Wired for War, Peter Singer's fantastic romp through the robotics revolution: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201986/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=2711155971&ref=pd_sl_13yemlz14d_e. Ranging from the scientific advances that are bringing us robots integrated into military units, to a future in which robots might largely fight on their own guided by a few simple principals of complexity theory, Peter also covers issues such as how robots affect the ethics of warfare, and even how they could undermine Democratic Peace theory. It's also written like cotton candy--Peter has mastered the art of presenting serious work as readable and fun.

The second one is Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer: . With the Truman Project undertaking major educational work on climate change as a national security threat multiplier (check out www.operationfree.net) I needed to know the case made by the climate skeptics. Ian is one of the best of them, but so far, his book misses the forest for the trees. Of course, our climate naturally goes through cycles and has for hundreds of thousands of years. No one disputes that. The issue is whether at this moment in geopolitical time, with borders solified between nations and refugees hemmed in, the losers from this cycle will be concentrated in areas that will cause greater unrest and destroy already fragile states--and whether given that reality, we can do anything to slow the process. So I'm unimpressed. Science needs to be a part of policy -- but science that ignores the human dimension of foreign policy is not worth much.

Okay, so I don't spend my summer vacation reading military doctrine documents or thick tomes on Iraq and Afghanistan. Reading isn't even my primary objective, though the kids are grown and there are no grandchildren yet to distract.

First I've got to clear out the basement for the family reunion at Thanksgiving. Then there are my Arabic lessons: four hours a week during this staycation, though I confess that remembering four-syllable non-cognates doesn't get easier with more hours of tutoring (or with advancing age). I've learned three Romance languages to high levels of proficiency as an adult. If I could get one-third of the way with Arabic I'd be ecstatic.

Then there is the yard-long shelf of "to read." Recent immigrant literature has grabbed me lately. I've just started Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccostumed Earth," having polished off Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland." Both those titles convey the sense of ill-ease and uncertainty that seems to dominate in this literature. I've already inhaled "What Is the What" and "Kite Runner," both fascinating accounts not only of the homeland but importantly also of a life saving America that has a hard time living up to its ideals.

Do I really need to explain the relevance of these to national security? What is our "nation" if not one of immigration. How people come to America and how they become Americans is the heart of the American experience, one that changes with each new wave and point of origin. And these more recent writers are sooo much more honest and clear-eyed about that experience than the American Dream mythology we were all taught in grade school.

I confess I stray from time to time to Ian McEwan's novels--I ididn't like "Amsterdam" much but "Saturday" and of course "Atonement" make up for it. Here too there is a sense of ill ease and uncertainty that finds resolution but without heroism.

Ours it seems to me is not so much a heroic era as a hard slogging one. All our wars are long: not only Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the recently deceased war on terror), but also HIV/AIDS, global warming, women's rights, poverty. Even a single Saturday (see McEwan) brings with it challenges that require clear thinking and moral backbone.

Now I head back to the basement, and a few more Arabic verbs...

Okay, so I don't spend my summer vacation reading military doctrine documents or thick tomes on Iraq and Afghanistan. Reading isn't even my primary objective, though the kids are grown and there are no grandchildren yet to distract.

First I've got to clear out the basement for the family reunion at Thanksgiving. Then there are my Arabic lessons: four hours a week during this staycation, though I confess that remembering four-syllable non-cognates doesn't get easier with more hours of tutoring (or with advancing age). I've learned three Romance languages to high levels of proficiency as an adult. If I could get one-third of the way with Arabic I'd be ecstatic.

Then there is the yard-long shelf of "to read." Recent immigrant literature has grabbed me lately. I've just started Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccostumed Earth," having polished off Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland." Both those titles convey the sense of ill-ease and uncertainty that seems to dominate in this literature. I've already inhaled "What Is the What" and "Kite Runner," both fascinating accounts not only of the homeland but importantly also of a life saving America that has a hard time living up to its ideals.

Do I really need to explain the relevance of these to national security? What is our "nation" if not one of immigration. How people come to America and how they become Americans is the heart of the American experience, one that changes with each new wave and point of origin. And these more recent writers are sooo much more honest and clear-eyed about that experience than the American Dream mythology we were all taught in grade school.

I confess I stray from time to time to Ian McEwan's novels--I ididn't like "Amsterdam" much but "Saturday" and of course "Atonement" make up for it. Here too there is a sense of ill ease and uncertainty that finds resolution but without heroism.

Ours it seems to me is not so much a heroic era as a hard slogging one. All our wars are long: not only Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the recently deceased war on terror), but also HIV/AIDS, global warming, women's rights, poverty. Even a single Saturday (see McEwan) brings with it challenges that require clear thinking and moral backbone.

Now I head back to the basement, and a few more Arabic verbs...

I just finished reading <Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend> by Larry Tye. My wife got the book for me because I am a rabid fan, but this book is about much, much more than baseball. By focusing on the great African-American pitcher Satchel Paige, an unusual product of the early twentieth century Mobile slums, Tye provides a penetrating picture of the Jim Crow South, and of a way of life that Americans tolerated for far too long.

It may well be difficult for many Gen Xers and Gen Yers, especially those serving in the miitary, to comprehend the degradation that was the daily bread of blacks in the South, and indeed in many partsof the North, which extended into their parents' lifeitme. After all, our troops are led by a commander-in-chief of mixed race (enough to have kept one out of an all-white southern hotel, or bathroom for that matter, until the 1960s) and are aware, at least by reputation, of the successful tenure of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell. Indeed, as Tye notes in passing (and as Jackie Robinson's better known story underscores) blacks fought honorably in America's wars--there is now a Pentagon corridor dedicated to African-American fighting men and woment--only to return home to their abject status.

As our troops continue to fight overseas for minority rights, and human dignity, <Satchel> reminds all of us, baseball fans and non-fans alike, that our own battles called forth bravery of a different knid, but that, to praphrase Churchill, we finally did the right thing after we had exhausted all other alternatives.

Three suggestions.

· Alain Chouet La « guerre à la terreur » est-elle la « mère de toutes les guerres » ? © (Texte publié sur le site de l'ESISC - www.esisc.org -, Bruxelles, septembre 2006) Version PDF (Available in English at the ECSIS website)

Chouet, an Arabist and a Persian scholar, is former Head of the Security Intelligence Service of the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure)

· Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1952), 2008 reprint from The University of Chicago Press, with a new introduction by Andrew J. Bacevich: ISBN 978-0-226-58398-3 ,

Still the best philosophical antidote to American hubris on the world stage.

Tao Te Ching by Lao TZU trans. Man-Ho Kwok (Fall River Press, 2008). A brilliant new translation that renders the classic wisdom in exquisite, pungent poetry. Leagues ahead of all its predecessors. Soothing to those who wish for more ‘Way’ and less ‘Surge.’

cheers