Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I find this whole book to be more than a little disturbing. But while it is mostly a forward-looking effort from the sadly puzzling historian and author Niall Ferguson, I find it most frightening when it looks to the past. It's in those parts of his thesis that Mr. Ferguson argues, for example, that the U.S. should have dropped as many as 50 atom bombs on China in order to end the Korean War quickly and neatly, and where he opines that the Vietnam War should have been fought even more ruthlessly starting back in the mid-1960s, as a way to snap the North's resolve. It was all enough to compel me to temporarily close Colossus with a scowl and a wrinkled brow to reach for the comfort of a dusty old volume containing he works of Tacitus, the first and second century Roman historian who Mr. Ferguson no doubt knows far better than I do. Tacitus, best known for his opinions about the throne's power to corrupt and the scandals and ruined lives its corruption produced, famously wrote about Domitian's reign of terror: "They made a desert and called it victory." Evidently, if Mr. Ferguson had his way, the desert would stretch far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed the controversial U.S. war effort in Iraq from its first rumblings, criticizing it only where it has paused to reassess or deny its imperial designs when that time could have been used to forcefully to indiscriminately crush resistance (or anything that appears to be resistance ... or that might evolve into resistance). He argues for a U.S. foreign policy along the lines of that employed by imperial Britain, endeavoring to win the Middle East's hearts and minds by ruling their pocketbooks and politics. If these dangerous points had been made by almost anyone else, I would have stopped reading after 30 or 40 pages and dismissed the writer as a crackpot. But I grew to know Mr. Ferguson through the Pity of War and The House of Rothschild -- not books that swayed me with every argument, but which were full of worthwhile, uncommon, meaty, and complex theories that forced me more than once to dramatically reconsider what I believed. And while last year's troubling effort Empire now seems like a kind of uncomfortable preface to Colossus, it had been easy for me until now to dismiss that book as an aberration. So I returned to Colossus after a short break and finished its 400 pages, sadly shaking my head almost the whole time. Without a doubt, Mr. Ferguson is a talented writer with a stunning command of information and historical context. He writes compellingly and with great enthusiasm, more so in Colossus than in his earlier work. But it appears to me to be sorely misdirected here: he fails to convince that the U.S. has the power to develop the kind of empire he describes and, more importantly, he fails to explain why it should even try to do so. I get the idea that without many decades of time to provide context to what he writes about, Mr. Ferguson loses almost all of the edge that previously made him stand out among his contemporaries. Sigh. I don't know what sparked this apparent evolution in Mr. Ferguson's interests, but I can only hope that it doesn't get around.