Timothy J. Lynch is a Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne and convener of the sell-out 10 Great Books: A Melbourne Masterclass. His latest book, In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020) has been called ‘a cogent, graceful, provocative account’ of its subject.
I was once subjected to a lecture by a Dublin taxi driver ‘on the extensive inequities of the Central Intelligence Agency’. Its every atrocity, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, was relayed to me. It was an object lesson in the popular contempt in which the CIA has been held since its founding in the 1940s.
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In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling obser ... (read more)
The Trump presidency (2017–21) has generated more books across its four years than most presidencies have across eight. It is ironic that an avowedly anti-intellectual president, who advertises his dislike of reading, has had such a profound impact on political literature. These two books – Landslide and Peril – will likely remain the most read of that growing collection. As their titles sug ... (read more)
Because the United States was born in a revolution against Great Britain, the relationship between them, as the child decisively supplanted the parent, has remained key to world history for more than two centuries. Indeed, the ‘unspecialing’ of this relationship in recent decades, argues Ian Buruma, represents a psychological condition that British officials refuse to self-diagnose. He calls t ... (read more)
Barack Obama has written the best presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, and since Grant’s was mostly an account of his pre-presidential, Civil War generalship – written at speed, to stave off penury for his family, as he was dying of throat cancer – Obama’s lays some claim to being the greatest, at least so far. This first volume (of two) only reaches the third of his eight y ... (read more)
In year four of their respective terms, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enjoyed a mixed press. Some accounts lauded them, others were sceptical. The assessments were uniformly partisan. The titles of contemporary books reflected how Republicans backed Bush (he was ‘The Right Man’), Democrats Obama (for successfully ‘Bending History’). Donald Trump, on the other hand, stands as one of the m ... (read more)
