The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
Author: Ron Suskind
Ron Suskind’s book promises to be a bracing international thriller – an ensemble of uranium merchants and panicked diplomats, stealthy Jihadist soldiers and CIA operatives, anxious Muslim children and angry world leaders – a diverse cast of players who will define the struggle between hope and fear in the modern era. Suskind will close the Bush years – a period he has helped to define – with a startling glimpse at what America actually faces across the roiling world. In the intelligence and military communities, the overwhelming concern is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons and the ingredients from which weapons can be composed across a globe exploding with conflict and anti-American fervour. It is a failure of government that we are left with this overwhelming security issue – both domestically, where our security is deeply compromised, and internationally, where we face a host of seen and unseen threats.
This book will explode in the middle of an election year with unparalleled disclosures and analysis. The book’s nature and timing will place it at the very centre of the election battle as it enters its final six months. It will be a must-read for anyone hoping to exercise truly informed consent.
The New York Times - Michael Crowley
The rare writer who combines excellent reporting with a knack for novelistic writing about real people, [Suskind] skillfully traces several interwoven stories of cultural clashes and cross-pollination, all of them pursuing the question of whether America and the Muslim world can ever look past their differences and find understanding…Much like Suskind's previous books about the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty and The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, though occasionally breathless, is a reportorial feat—particularly when it comes to chronicling the internal machinations of the administration's national security team.
The New York Times - Mark Danner
…a complex, ambitious, provocative, risky and often maddening book. In a crowded, highly talented field, Mr. Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration…Behind the highly promoted scandals in The Way of the World lies a complex web of intersecting stories, the plotlines of a varied traveling company of actors whose doings Mr. Suskind chronicles with meticulous care…These narratives and others perform, in Mr. Suskind's hands, an intricate arabesque and manage, to a rather remarkable degree, to show us, in this age of terror, "the true way of the world."
The Washington Post - Alan Cooperman
Let's put aside, for a moment, the question of whether investigative reporter Ron Suskind's new book is properly considered nonfiction (as he and his publisher assert) or fiction (as the Bush administration and various critics contend). It's unquestionably a narrative: a humorous, indignant, touching story whose "characters"—as Suskind revealingly calls them—learn that America's most effective defense against international terrorism is not torture or wiretapping but the "moral energy" that flows from truthfulness, generosity, integrity and optimism.
Publishers Weekly
Suskind's take on the downfall of America's authority begins with what led to the attacks on September 11 and charts the country's subsequent tarnished international identity. Tackling tough issues with historic disclosures (including the accusation that members of the U.S. government forged documents and lied to win approval for going to war in Iraq), the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter offers compelling and provocative stories. Unfortunately, Alan Sklar's narration will surely cause many listeners to lose interest. Sklar tends to drone and his dry, monotone voice bears very little passion or intensity. His uninspired reading lessens the impact of Suskind's masterful research. A HarperCollins hardcover. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.See also: A Handbook on the GATS Agreement or Native American Issues
The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945
Author: Michael Beschloss
A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany.
With monumental fairness and balance, The Conquerors shows how Roosevelt privately refused desperate pleas to speak out directly against the Holocaust, to save Jewish refugees and to explore the possible bombing of Auschwitz to stop the killing. The book also shows FDR's fierce will to ensure that Germany would never threaten the world again. Near the end of World War II, he abruptly endorsed the secret plan of his friend, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to reduce the Germans to a primitive existence -- despite Churchill's fear that crushing postwar Germany would let the Soviets conquer the continent. The book finally shows how, after FDR's death, President Truman rebelled against Roosevelt's tough approach and adopted the Marshall Plan and other more conciliatory policies that culminated in today's democratic, united Europe.
Publishers Weekly
Beschloss provides an engaging, if not revelatory, narrative of key events leading up to the conferences at Yalta (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) and Potsdam (Truman, Churchill, Stalin) and the Allies' decisions about how to prevent future aggression by post-WWII Germany. In his preface, Beschloss makes much of the fact that this study draws on newly released documents from the former Soviet Union, the FBI and private archives. But Beschloss has unearthed nothing to change accepted views of how FDR developed and then began to implement his vision for postwar Germany. The tales Beschloss gathers here are no different from those already told in such books as Eric Larrabee's Commander-in-Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (1987) and Henry Morgenthau III's Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (1991). With reference to the latter volume, one of Beschloss's major subplots traces Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s efforts to interest FDR in a draconian, retributive plan (the "Morgenthau Plan") to destroy what little might remain of Germany's infrastructure after the war. Wisely, FDR demurred. Although breaking no new ground, this book by noted presidential historian Beschloss (who has published a trilogy on Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes) will fill the bill for those who need a readable account of how American officials and their Allied counterparts came to draw the map of postwar Europe. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
World War II is the most intensively studied conflict in history, and nearly 60 years after its end, fresh information is still emerging. Beschloss' account of U.S. policy toward Germany during the war integrates new archival research to place some of the war's crucial actors and events in illuminating new perspective. In particular, Beschloss's account of the relationship between Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the president he served for 12 years leads to surprising and disquieting insights into Franklin Roosevelt's failure to publicize — much less to obstruct — the Holocaust. John McCloy emerges from these pages with a reputation considerably enhanced. Often singled out as the official responsible for blocking proposals to bomb Auschwitz or its feeder railroads, McCloy is shown here to have acted under direct and specific orders from Roosevelt — a source he loyally concealed for decades after the war. Beschloss' sensitive portrayal of the difficulties of assimilated, educated Jews such as Morgenthau with a political culture still strongly influenced by antisemitism is both disturbing and moving. Some of the material he handles is radioactive, such as antisemitic comments from Roosevelt and Harry Truman against the background of the Holocaust, yet Beschloss neither palliates evil nor imposes the standards of the present on the past.
Library Journal
Beschloss draws on newly opened archives to show how Roosevelt and Truman decided Germany's fate. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A lucid study of how FDR's evolving vision of postwar Europe, enacted by Truman, prevented a recapitulation of Versailles and allowed for the rise of a prosperous, democratic, peaceable Germany. Political historian Beschloss (Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965, not reviewed, etc.), both an able scholar and a gifted interpreter of the past for a popular audience, addresses episodes of wartime diplomacy that have been well studied in the professional literature. Even so, he turns up a few surprises, notably Roosevelt's changing view of how Germany would best be kept from rearming itself after Hitler's fall and starting trouble again, as seemed to be a well-established pattern. In 1943, Roosevelt was inclined to carve up postwar Germany into three or more states, "bound only by a system of common services, and strip those new states of 'all military activities' and 'armament industries' "; two years later, having gained greater insight into Josef Stalin's ambitions thanks in part to constant admonitions from Winston Churchill-who warned, presciently, "Sooner or later they will reunite into one nation. . . . The main thing is to keep them divided, if only for fifty years"-Roosevelt was inclined to a clement but firm peace that would draw the defeated nation into the Western camp. His view was sharpened when it became apparent that Stalin was eager to keep Germany whole so that it could be milked for billions of dollars in reparations and be drawn into the Soviet bloc. Roosevelt died just before Hitler's regime ended-Beschloss offers the fascinating tidbit that FDR's last act before expiring was to throw away his draft card-but the underestimated Trumandid a remarkable job of negotiating a pact that "created the opportunity for the United States, Great Britain, and France . . . to create, at least in part of Germany, a democratic state whose system . . . would one day spread to the East." As it did, Beschloss observes, in some measure because of the foresight of the American leadership. An altogether valuable addition to the historical literature.
Table of Contents:
| Preface | ||
| Ch. 1 | The Plot to Murder Hitler | 1 |
| Ch. 2 | "Unconditional Surrender" | 9 |
| Ch. 3 | "Fifty Thousand Germans Must Be Shot!" | 18 |
| Ch. 4 | "On the Back of an Envelope" | 29 |
| Ch. 5 | The Terrible Silence | 38 |
| Ch. 6 | The "One Hundred Percent American" | 44 |
| Ch. 7 | "Oppressor of the Jews" | 56 |
| Ch. 8 | "We Will Have to Get Awfully Busy" | 70 |
| Ch. 9 | "Not Nearly as Bad as Sending Them to Gas Chambers" | 82 |
| Ch. 10 | "Somebody's Got to Take the Lead" | 91 |
| Ch. 11 | "Christianity and Kindness" | 98 |
| Ch. 12 | "It Is Very, Very Necessary" | 113 |
| Ch. 13 | "Do You Want Me to Beg Like Fala?" | 121 |
| Ch. 14 | "A Hell of a Hubbub" | 136 |
| Ch. 15 | "As Useful as Ten Fresh German Divisions" | 150 |
| Ch. 16 | "Lord Give the President Strength" | 166 |
| Ch. 17 | "The Only Bond Is Their Common Hate" | 178 |
| Ch. 18 | "Arguing About the Future of the World" | 189 |
| Ch. 19 | "No Earthly Powers Can Keep Him Here" | 203 |
| Ch. 20 | "What Will We Make of It?" | 216 |
| Ch. 21 | "I Was Never in Favor of That Crazy Plan" | 226 |
| Ch. 22 | "You and I Will Have to Bear Great Responsibility" | 238 |
| Ch. 23 | "How I Hate This Trip!" | 247 |
| Ch. 24 | "We Are Drifting Toward a Line Down the Center of Germany" | 260 |
| Ch. 25 | "The Spirit and Soul of a People Reborn" | 271 |
| Ch. 26 | The Conquerors | 283 |
| Author's Note and Acknowledgments | 293 | |
| General Sources | 297 | |
| Notes | 315 | |
| Index | 361 |
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