John’s Blog

I read Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror a few years ago, and really enjoyed it.

For this book, an account of the last 100 years or so of our American regime changing tendencies, the subject matter, while incredibly discouraging, was a lot better than the actual writing. His thesis is that we Americans do this sort of thing a lot, and this behavior is pretty much uniformly disastrous. (news flash)

I guess I knew this about US foreign policy since the Dulles brothers amped things up in the 50s, but I hadn’t really internalized that it goes back another 50 years prior, at least, to Hawaii and maybe before.

Anyway, discouraging. Important history to know, but you’d think we’d figure this out sooner or later.

I’ve had this book on my shelf for maybe a year now — it’s part of the Modern Library Chronicles series, which I’ve really enjoyed, and written by Kevin Starr, the preeminent California historian. I’ve always been really interested in California history — it seems like such a metaphor for the American experience — but have been a little bit intimidated by Starr’s exceptionally thorough treatments of particular decades (they’re super-long).

This book, as you might guess, is probably a little thinner than it should be for the subject — in only 300 pages, it’s tough to tell a reasonable history of a very large state. I found it interesting enough — and liked his tours through Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and our water-oriented history. But probably wouldn’t recommend, unless you’re interested in California, but only enough to read a too quick summary.