Great books you should read: The White House Mess

If you liked The West Wing, you might like this.  I must however point out that when it comes to the books of Christopher Buckley, I’m giving rigged results here as I just buy the guy’s books on spec.  I read this in 1987, reread it a few times,  and only discovered years later that he had actually written quite a few novels (This was in the days before Amazon.)  The joy! The joy! It was like discovering a secret Beatles album.

Buckley’s a US political satirist most famous for being A) the son of  US Conservative Ayatollah William F. Buckley, and B.) writing the novel Thank You For Smoking, which was made into a very enjoyable movie with the criminally underrated Aaron Eckhart.

It’s 1988, and Democratic President Elect Thomas Nelson Tucker is being sworn into office. What happens is a diary of his deputy chief of staff’s musings on the noble but chaotic Tucker Presidency, and it was, for many years, my favourite book. It’s both funny and touching, and will be really appreciated by those of us who take our politics with a bit of hope bit of hope on the side.

A book worth reading: The New Machiavelli.

An entertaining primer about power.

It would do our new Fine Gael masters no harm if they were to download Tony Blair’s former chief of of staff Jonathan Powell’s book “The New Machiavelli” onto their iPods. At 16 hours, the unabridged version is a hefty chunk of time, but well worth it for those interested not merely in politics but in the exercise of power.

Powell compares Machiavelli’s lessons on the exercise of power from “The Prince” with how decisions were made during his time in the Blair administration. It’s frank, revealing, sometimes funny (there’s a particularly funny story of Powell ringing Blair for advice from Blair’s driver on dealing with a potential car bomb in Powell’s car. Blair relates advice from his driver, gets bored, tells Powell “It’ll probably be OK”, hangs up, and then rings back later to see if he was blown up)

One of the interesting differences I noticed between British and Irish politics was just how more detached British politicians seem to be from actual control. Irish ministers, who serve much longer ministerial terms, tend to get a much better grip on their departments. On top of that, the British media seem to have a much greater say in deciding what government does than the Irish media do, with some individual editors being more powerful than most cabinet ministers.

One final point: Gordon Brown does not come well out of this book. Powell, admittedly, is biased, but the Gordon stories are so bad that I found myself questioning Blair’s judgement in keeping such a paralysing force in his government.

Long, but enjoyable. The short of book you should read/listen to with a notebook ready. 

A Great Book: Moriarty, The Hound of the D’Urbervilles.

Another one for the Sherlock Holmes fans, and great fun too.

Kim Newman has written a series of short stories about the mirror evil twins of Holmes and Watson, Professor Moriarty and his boorish yet amusing sidekick, Colonel Sebastian Moran. The book itself is presented as a recovered manuscript written by Moran, and is written in a politically incorrect and bawdy style which is actually very entertaining. On top of the style, Newman has also packed the stories with subtle references to the Sherlock Holmes stories (told from Moriarty’s side) and other literature of the time, including a clever take on HG Wells’s War of The Worlds.
A must for the Sherlockians. Or Holmesians. Available from Amazon here:

Good books you should read: Resurrection Day.

“Resurrection Day” by Brendan Dubois is set in an alternative 1972 where the Cuban Missile Crisis caused a nuclear war which devastated part of the US and all of Russia. JFK is loathed as a war criminal, and a journalist is trying to investigate what really happened.

Was surprised that it wasn’t a bigger hit when it came out in 1999, as it is a really enjoyable book. Slight disclaimer of sorts: I enjoyed the book so much that I wrote to the author, and he sent me back a really nice letter, so a good guy too!

A great book for the political anoraks: Then Everything Changed.

Jeff Greenfield is a political reporter for CBS, and his book “Then Everything Changed” paints three What-If scenarios based on real life facts: That JFK was nearly killed in December 1960, before being sworn in as president, that Bobby Kennedy nearly didn’t go through the kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, and that Gerald Ford nearly beat Jimmy Carter in 1976. The three stories are not only very informative (Greenfield brings his personal knowledge of US politics and its players to bear) but also quite cheekily written, with asides about what effect these events would have had on other well known individuals.

A great read for the American political junkie. You can get it on the Amazon link here:  

A shameless promotion for my eNovel The Ministry of Love.

And now a shameless plug for my satirical thriller eNovel available on Amazon. Hey, I’ve got to pay for the blog somehow! All those typos and ill thought out political ideas cost money, you know.

Here’s the blurb on “The Ministry of Love”:

Love. Everyone wants it. 

Prime Minister Alexander Fairfax reckons he might just get a second term if he can provide the people with it. Dr. Julian Tredestrian, the most brilliant mind of his generation, reckons he has a plan how to do it. International assassin The Stoat (The Jackal was already taken) has been tasked by powerful interests to stop it. 

In the middle of all this, Chief Inspector Switzerland has got to catch a serial killer who keeps killing really irritating celebrities.

Love. It always gets a bit messy.

You can purchase the eBook here on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com (If you’re in Ireland, Australia or New Zealand. Amazon brutally recognising the fact that we are American colonies), or Amazon.de, and you would be doing me a great favour if you would leave a review on the website you purchase it from. Don’t be afraid to be honest. They like that at Amazon, so they do.

If you have not got an eReader, you can download (for free) a Kindle reader for your iPad, PC, iPhone or tablet here. It’s easy to download. After all, I did it, and you know what I’m like with technology. The CIA have me on standby just to stand beside Iranian reactors, which will almost certainly cause them to crash.

A Great Book Worth Reading: When The Lights Went Out.

“When the lights went out” by Andy Beckett is an absolute must-read if you’re interested in British politics in the 1970s, and let’s be honest, the 1970s is where so many of the political movements that affect us even now were born. The Green movement started, as did the recognition that there were economic forces in the world even more powerful than national governments. The 1970s was also the period of time when the post-war liberal consensus started to break down, and the New Right of Thatcher and Reagan began to win over socially conservative working class voters to a new type of conservative thinking.

What particularly sells this book is the writing style of the author, who along with giving a picture of the time, describes his own attempts to visit some of the key places and people of the era, including the proposed site of the airport in the North Sea  that Ted Heath wanted to build, or the TUC “Worker’s Hotel” in Bournemouth, or the fact that one of the famous IMF meetings bizarrely took place in the back of a tailor’s shop.

The book addresses many of the myths of the 1970s (1976 was the year where the gap between rich and poor was the narrowest in British history, something that has been airbrushed out of modern British politics) and paints a broader picture of the era than just strikes and the far left.

Well worth a read.  

A Great Book: Strange Days Indeed.

A great read, indeed.

I enjoyed it so much that I just have to give five stars to Francis Wheen’s “Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia.” The book is a look at some of political and social madness of the 1970s, primarily in the UK and the US, and is great fun, being both informative and laugh out loud funny.

Wheen takes the reader through Richard Nixon’s mental breakdown during Watergate to the OZ obscenity trial (where the British State attempted to draft in experts to determine what size Rupert Bear’s penis was. I’m not joking) to the British cabinet secretary stripping off naked and having a nervous breakdown in front of the Governor of the Bank of England, to various plots to overthrow the British Govt using the army, the police, and by placing ads in the Daily Telegraph!

Add in Idi Amin and Uri Geller and you have one of the most enjoyable books of the year. Check out Wheen’s videos at the Amazon links above to get a taste of the books.

Great books you should read: The Dream of Rome

A United Europe, without a treaty?

London Mayor and former Tory MP Boris Johnson is a man with a passion for the classics, and in “The Dream of Rome” it shows. A moderate eurosceptic himself (Because, as he points out, he actually worked in Brussels as a journalist.) he uses his love of the Roman world to compare and contrast with the hopes and failings of the European Union.

The book is written in a very light-of-touch style, which makes it enjoyable and in parts quite funny, but attempts by eurosceptics to use it as an “I told you so!” will fail, primarily because it highlights the EU’s respect, unlike the Romans, for diversity. He rightly points out that the Romans managed to convert English warlords, German chiefs and Spanish fishermen all into Roman citizens holding similar values (And culinary tastes such as the disgusting fish-sauce Garum, which was to the Roman table what ketchup is to the American.) in a way that the EU has failed to do. But then the EU never put the sword to the throat of its citizens either. And whereas the Emperor Augustus created in himself a uniting image, right down to putting his head on the coinage, for the whole empire, it is doubtful Jose Manuel Barrosso would be willing, or appreciated for,  doing the same.

Of course, could you say the same for President Blair? Augustus pretty much declared himself a god. Tony wouldn’t do that, would he?

A very entertaining holiday read, and doesn’t require too much pre-read knowledge of the Roman Empire. Which is nice.     

Great books you should read: LBJ, Portrait of a President.

Lyndon Johnson is reviled by both the liberal left and the conservative right in the United States, which is no mean feat. Is it possible for any serious student of US history not to be familiar with the taunt of “Hey! Hey! LBJ, How many kids you kill today?”

And yet without Lyndon Johnson Barack Obama would not be president today.

Viet Nam, with a push from JFK, really kicked off under LBJ. Yet here was a president who had no real interest in foriegn affairs and wanted to eradicate poverty in the US. One facet the book really gets across is the idea that what LBJ really wanted was not to bomb North Viet Nam but to cut a deal with Ho Chi Minh, another politician, as to what was needed to do the business.  In exasperation he used to bawl at his advisors that he would rather be building schools in Viet Nam than bombing it.

Lyndon Johnson was possibly the most corrupt man to ever serve in the presidency, but history speaks for itself. He brought in the 1965 Civil Rights bill knowing full well that it would (And did.) destroy the Democratic Party in the South. But it was the right thing to do, and for that LBJ deserves more gratitude than he gets.    

Robert Dallek’s slim book is a masterful blending of two heavier tomes on LBJ’s life, and another example of how sometimes less is more.