Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of When the Whistle Blows (Fran Slayton)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:01 EST

There is a tradition in Anglo-American literature of coming-of-age tales that capture the mystery and magic of youth by invoking the supernatural. Stand-outs in the genre include Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, Dan Simmons's Summer of Night, and Jim Black's River Season. Ever Harper Lee's classic, To Kill a Mockingbird derives much moodiness from hints that Boo Radley is some kind of monster and, just because of the identity of the author, Stephen King's The Body and Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon read like horror stories. Fran Cannon Slayton's first novel, When the Whistle Blows, does not have any magic in it, but is nonetheless magical.

In a set of interlocking stories--set on successive All Hallows' Eves, from 1943 to 1949--Jimmy Cannon grows from a boy of 12 to a young man of 18. Like Ms Slayton's own father, he does so in Rowlesburg, WV, alongside the B&O Railroad and the Cheat River. Jimmy's father is the foreman for the railroad and his older brother, like most of the men in town, works for them too. But, as his dad warns them, the age of diesels is right around the corner and when the steam trains go they'll take most of the work with them. Rowlesburg is palpably a town without a future. Likewise, Mr. Cannon has emphysema and is old before his time. Jimmy is in a figurative race with a diesel train, to see if he'll be a man before his father and the way of life he loves both pass.

Ms Slayton does an extraordinary job of vesting us emotionally in a time and a place who days we know are numbered. I was reminded of How Green Was My Valley in that regard. Jimmy's own gang of friends, the Platoon, parallels the secret society of the railroad workers and there's something particularly effecting about the way the men retain the same kind of bonds we all had as boys. Fraternal organizations are long since out of style, but the stories here remind us of their value and the social cohesion they fostered.

Change, for the worse, is also represented by the new principal in town, a city fella who thinks school should be open on the first day of hunting season. The response that provokes is just one of the amusing bits in the book, several of which are laugh-out-loud funny.

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll not soon forget this terrific debut novel.

Grade: A+

Review of Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Jonathan Wilson)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:01 EST

So begins Inverting the Pyramid, in a chapter titled From Genesis to the Pyramid, and the evocation of the Old Testament is pretty appropriate in a book that aims to be nothing less than a biblical account of the development of soccer tactics. In some ways, the project has a tinge of lunacy to it. Mr. Wilson seems to assume that the reader will recognize players and coaches ranging from Uruguay to Hungary geographically and from the December 8, 1863 meeting at Freemason's Tavern in London that banned the use of hands in "The Simplest Game" to a 2007 lecture in Belgrade temporally. There can't be more than a tiny handful of obsessives worldwide who can and will follow everywhere the author leads.

But, for the general reader there is a unifying theme being illustrated that makes it possible to follow along, however confusedly at times. The earliest origins of the game the rest of the world knows as football were in a medieval British sport that Mr. Wilson refers to as "the mob game," which "essentially involved two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch." As would befit what seems to have been little more than dismounted buzkashi, all of the action and, therefore, all of the men on the field clustered about the "object," not unlike what happens if you put little kids on a soccer field with a ball today. The pyramid of the title was the dominant early formation that grew out of the codification of rules and the more rigorous organization of sides. It was a 2-3-5, meaning: two defenders; three "midfielders"; and five men up front trying to score. Actually, even the central midfielder in the pyramid was an offensive as much as a defensive weapon.

If we recall that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, we will not be surprised to find that by the end of the book, the formation that has evolved and that Mr. Wilson suggests is the near universal future is a 4-6-0, a set devoid of forwards. Of course, as defensive as that is it isn't quite a 10-0-0, so it's fair to wonder whether we aren't still a ways from the End of soccer History. But what the book charts is the ebb and flow over time between more offense-oriented sets and more defense-oriented and not just the tactical reasons for the changes but the aesthetic tug of war between those who think the game ought to be beautiful and to flow as it only can when going forward versus those who think the point is to win trophies and artistry be damned. One would like to think that spectators, if nothing else, will prevent the game from reaching its logical conclusion, in an entirely defensive shell. Such would render the often unwatchable actually torturous.

At any rate, like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, this is a book to be read as much for the author's virtuoso performance as anything. Even when you get lost in the thickets you can't help but marvel at Mr. Wilson's command of soccer arcana and his passion for his subject. Learning something along the way is kind of gravy.

Grade: A-

Review of Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer (Chuck Culpepper)

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:01 EST

One of the universally recognized reasons that soccer is the global game is its simplicity. The modern image of the Soccer Mom is a recognition that suburban mothers like it because their kids can play it, no matter how unathletic. Not only is the game easy--requiring only a willingness to run hard and kick often--the equipment is minimal; and the rules are nearly nonexistent, other than offsides. The prospective player or spectator can be taught all he needs to know in just minutes. The contrast to a sport like baseball could hardly be starker.

Despite all that, one of the central premises of Chuck Culpepper's account of following the English Premier League for a season is supposed to be his enduring and theoretically charming ignorance. When, late in the book, he's still pretending to have no idea what a brace it's not only implausible for a putative soccer fan perspective but for a speaker of the English language. The whole shtick is extremely labored.

Mr. Culpepper's difficulties navigating the British train system and EPL ticket-buying arrangements are more believable. But the latter complication largely stems from the attempts to ban hooligans from games by making attendance difficult, which robs the topic of a considerable portion of its humor.

The author's avoidance of the real reasons behind the gauntlet you have to run for tickets is symptomatic of the problem with the book's other big theme. You see, Mr. Culpepper is a professional sportswriter and the premise is that he's become so fed with the various pathologies that beset American sports--not to mention his disgust at the Bush presidency--that he seeks refuge in the quaint world of European soccer. Huh? These are leagues that are plagued by prima donna athletes in constant trouble with the law making salaries that are absurd while demonstrating no loyalty to their teams. Though the hikes in costs and the security measures introduced in recent years have had a salutary effect, it's a sport with a notorious history of racist, nationalist, and sectarian violence and chants. It's been commercialized to degree that would startle the average American--with uniforms that double as billboards--and has had enough cheating scandals that results are untrustworthy. Check out the very funny British tv-movie, Eleven men Against Eleven, which makes North Dallas Forty look like something from NFL films. Topping it all off, the EPL is competitively unbalanced, with just four teams contending every year. The fans of 16 teams begin every season knowing they have no chance to win. What's the point? It's a sport where there are never Miracle Mets.

For the most part, Mr. Culpepper spent the season following Portsmouth, a reasonable enough mid-tier choice. But that further narrows the view until we're left with a guy feigning devotion to a team playing a game we're asked to believe he can't figure out. There's not much there there. And, of course, the "bloody confused" meme prevents Mr. Culpepper from offering any systematic observations about what he saw during his year with the EPL, which is a noticeable omission. As it happens, I too followed the EPL for a season and while folk will differ with my analysis, it just wasn't very hard to derive one. Indeed, it's hard not to arrive at one after watching for any extended period of time. That Mr. Culpepper didn't is just the final artificiality of the book.

Grade: C-

Review of In Good Hands: A Harpur & Iles Mystery (Bill James)

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:01 EST

Q: The first Colin Harpur novel appeared in 1985, and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles came along a bit later. What else was going on in British crime fiction at the time? What did you set out to do differently? Other than Anthony Powell, what writers haunted your imagination?

A: Most crime fiction deals with police at low or middling rank. I aimed to show two very highly placed officers who are committed to fighting crime, unbribable, but very fallible morally and socially. The books aim to shock and amuse by featuring two men who virtually run a police force but also conduct personal relationships in very unconventional, even dubious, ways.

I?ve said it boringly often, but the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation.
-INTERVIEW: Interview with the master, Part I: Detectives Beyond Borders talks with Bill James (Peter Rozovsky , 6/29/09, Detectives Beyond Borders)

As Bill James describes above, the Harpur & Iles series revolves around Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, who tries to navigate the treacherous territory between his immediate superior, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, who is more a force of nature than an officer of the law, and their boss, the utterly inept Chief Constable Mark Lane. Harpur isn't above cutting corners himself, but Iles borders on being a psychopath. So our "hero" faces the difficult choice of protecting an effective, if often illegal, weapon against crime or turning the department over to a man he knows will lose the war on crime to the criminals.

In Good Hands opens in the aftermath of the murder of two crims who'd beaten the rap for killing a promising young policeman. Pretty much everyone assumes they were executed by Iles, whose mistress they'd also killed. Now Lane wants Harpur to spy on Iles and pin the killings on him. Meanwhile, two more underworld figures, Lester Magellan and Raoul Caesar Brace, have just been found murdered in nearly identical fashion. Though Iles doesn't appear to have a similar motive for vengeance, he's the most likely suspect. Of course, it could have been 'Panicking' Ralph Ember, whose 14 year-old daughter was having an affair with Brace, known to one and all as "the original nice guy." Or it could also have just been a prophylactic killing, since Magellan was part of a gang planning on robbing a local drug lord, a plan that's none too secret.

This isn't the easiest series to join in the middle and James's writing style offers unique challenges to the reader anyway. The author famously relies on dialogue to drive his stories--a la Elmore Leonard--but often has the characters engage in near monologues, talking over each other and not answering each others' questions. Each book also assumes some considerable familiarity with the tangled histories between the cops, between the criminals, and between cops and criminals: like the fact that Harpur had an affair with Iles's wife and that Iles own taste for young girls has him currently chasing Harpur's daughter. Indeed, it's all sufficiently complex and foreign to an American reader in particular, that you may take awhile to realize that James is actually writing a epic dark comedy. The first time you laugh out loud you may not even know that you're supposed to. But once you get the rhythms down you'll gobble joyfully through this great set of novels.

Grade: A

Review of The Girl Who Played with Fire (Stieg Larsson)

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:01 EST

Combine the current popularity of Scandinavian mysteries--like those by Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason--with Stieg Larsson's savvy career move of dropping dead before publication of his Millennium Trilogy, and you can see why these books are getting the big push. Add in a heroine, Lisbeth Salander, who's a bisexual genius computer hacker with near ninja-like fighting skill and a hero, Mikael Blomkvist, who's a crusading left-wing journalist, as Larsson himself was, and you've a product with a lot going for it marketing-wise. That said, as we might expect from a Communist author, the story is totally unbelievable -- see the description of Salander above -- and the political pedantry turns what could have been a diverting 180 page thriller into a 500+ page doorstop. Blomkvist is investigating sex-trafficking in Sweden and it's a topic that deserves our outage. But indignation doesn't wear all that well for page after page. Salander is the Girl of the title and in passing he refers to her, more appropriately, as The Girl Who Hates Men Who Hate Women. But the reader who doesn't hate all men, other than Socialist writers, will have their patience sorely tested. Try a Martin Beck, by a pair of Swedish Socialists who managed to be great writers, instead.

Grade: C

Review of A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy (Charlotte Greig)

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:01 EST

Before we begin, two notes: (1) I don't think it possible to discuss this book adequately without revealing the cliffhanger (or coat hanger) ending, so if you haven't read the novel yet you may prefer to do so first; and, (2) I am going to discuss the book that Ms Greig has written though I realize that may not be the one she intended. This latter gives the author the benefit of the doubt and improves the grade of the book.

The novel is set at a university and a time that seem to roughly correspond to Ms Greig's own school days at Sussex University in the 70s. Susannah is a bright philosophy student involved in a live-in relationship with a slightly older man. He's an antiques dealer and the physical passion in their relationship has cooled. Meanwhile, she's attracted to Rob, a fellow student. Even as she wrestles with the ideas of Nietzsche, Feyerabend, Heidgger, Kuhn, and Kierkegaard, she becomes pregnant and must decide which if either of these men she would raise the child with, if she decides to give birth.

Susannah's personal philosophizing begins with Nietzsche, after another student goes crazy reading him:

'As I finished the last page of Human, All Too Human... I felt elated. I may have spent the whole day lying on the floor half dressed, reading Nietzsche and smoking and drinking cups of tea, but that didn't mean that I was a dosser, or that my life was empty and isolated. It meant that I was a free spirit, and like the free spirits of the past, I had a secret destiny, a task to do. I just wasn't sure what it was yet.'

This notion, of the self as utterly free of moral and social restraints, is rather juvenile, but she's a youngster, so we can cut her some slack. That bit about the "secret destiny" comes back to haunt though, in the form of the pregnancy. Indeed, she later states her dilemma in just the sort of selfish fashion one would expect from someone immature enough to find Nietzsche profound: "I was on my own... There would have to be a sacrifice: my child or my work." Unravel that sentence and you stumble over the "on my own" from someone who, by definition, is not on their own since they're with child and the possessive "my child" before even getting to the cold calculation of the choice she poses herself: a life or her work.

In the middle portion of her studies, Susannah is challenged by the critiques of Science and Reason that Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others offered and we begin to hope that she may be able to outgrow mere rationalism, especially the anti-human variant that a friend preaches at her as an excuse for killing the baby. Susannah responds:

I think you're wrong about this abortion. It's not just like having a tooth out. It's not just a bunch of cells. It's a potential human being.

[I]t's a living being. I don't know if I can kill it.

And when she then moves on to reading Kierkegaard and the parallels with Abraham and Isaac become apparent to her, she seems on the verge of taking the "leap of faith" and keeping the child.

However, our confidence that Susannah is even capable of making a wise decision is tempered by the realities of her life and her behavior. Cheating on her boyfriend is no more forgivable because he turns out to be a closeted homosexual. Likewise, her view of the sex she has with Rob is freighted with a significance he doesn't attach to it. And when she throws herself at their professor, who is obviously tortured by his failure to help the student who had a breakdown, it's just pathetic. So it is certainly in keeping with Susannah's essential vacuousness and failure to develop as a person generally but a moral philosopher in particular that she goes ahead and kills the baby. more than that, she serves as the perfect guide to the evil core of modern European philosophy. That "destiny" Susannah had felt coming turns out to be the killing of another human being, one she treats as no more important than a tooth after all. And who will celebrate her choice of "her work" over that child's life when her own philosophy allows for that blithe termination?

One would like to think that Ms Greig's intent is to hold Susannah up as just such an example of the malignancy of Europe's secular rationalism. But in an interview she had the following to say:

"I wrote two endings, actually," Greig confesses. "I didn't know when I was writing it what she was going to do. Obviously I had to go back again and change a few things once I'd decided, but I really was with her, I just didn't know what she ought to do, and I think that was the point of the Kierkegaard - just struggle with it. Keeping faith with oneself, ie, not just accepting the social attitudes of the day. I suppose I wanted to investigate what happens when you go beyond that - what do you want? What do you need? How are you thinking about your own life?"

This is a radical misunderstanding of the leap of faith. We are not called to have faith in ourselves, but in God. Isaac is saved precisely because Abraham has this unshakable faith. Susannah's child dies because she has faith in herself instead. Such is the murderous tragedy of post-Christian Europe.

Grade: C+

Review of The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the Nationalal Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food (Mark Kurlansky)

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:01 EST

To anyone who knows and understands the United States, the fact that there was a Federal Writers? Project at all seems nothing short of miraculous. This is America, the land with no Ministry of Culture, where politicians alone are portrayed on the money. Almost unique among Western republics, the likeness of not one writer, philosopher, painter, or composer has ever graced the engraving of a U.S. bill or coin. The separation of church and state may be the great articulated legal principle, but another sacrosanct concept is the separation of state and culture. And yet there was an age when the U.S. government permanently employed painters, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, actors, and writers to produce art.
-INTRODUCTION: Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky

Mr. Kurlansky, being a dyed-in-the-wool, if not down-right woolly-headed, liberal, is so enraptured by the above concept that he's put together a collection of essays from the FWP's abandoned attempt to follow up its successful series of guidebooks on America with a similar series called, America Eats. Unfortunately, the quality of the writing here is at best uneven, almost never more than pedestrian, and not infrequently unreadable. While it's interesting enough to discover what folks used to eat and how they prepared it, one quickly resorts to just skimming to find the recipes. It's no coincidence that the essay reviewers mention most often is by Eudora Welty, who actually became a famous writer, and is heavy on recipes, light on text.

Though that surely was not Mr. Kurlansky's intention, the book is an effective argument against New Deal boondoggles.

Grade: C

Review of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford History of the United States) (George Herring)

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:01 EST

Even more than I realized when I began this book, foreign policy has been central to the national experience. External assistance was essential to the birth of an independent United States; concerns about international commerce and foreign threats decisively influenced the form of government created in the Constitution of 1787. Foreign policy was instrumental in securing the young republic's political experiment, establishing a continental Union, and determining the outcome of its Civil War. During the nation's second full century and beyond, foreign policy has become even more critical to its prosperity and security.

Throughout its history, the United States has taken a distinctive approach toward foreign policy. Americans have held decidedly mixed views about their place in the international order. On the one hand, they have been allured by the riches of the world, and from the Revolution to the present, the pursuit of economic self-interest has produced a high level of global involvement. On the other, from the outset they expressed disdain for traditional European power politics and viewed themselves as a people apart, the harbingers of a new world order.

From Puritan leader John Winthrop's proclamation of a "city upon a hill" through George W. Bush's born-again zeal, Americans have seen themselves as a chosen people with a providential mission. This ideal has spurred a drive to do good in the world, manifested in the work of merchants, missionaries, and educators. It undergirded the Wilsonian dream of the United States as world leader and a world reformed according to American ideals.

This ideal has also spawned a certain arrogance in America's dealings with other peoples that was used to justify the expulsion of Native Americans, the wresting from Mexico of one-third of its territory, and the imposition of colonial rule on Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. From an ill-fated incursion into Canada in 1775 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, America's sense of its grand historical mission has been used to rationalize the extension of liberty by force. Certain of their righteousness, Americans confidently expected to be welcomed as liberators. The ironic result, in most cases, has been to spark nationalist opposition among the people invaded.

America's democratic system has also given a distinctive hue to its foreign policy. From the beginnings, foreign policy has been the object of fierce partisan dispute. On occasion, an aroused public has pushed the government to act. More often, public indifference or apathy have brought about increasingly sophisticated efforts on the part of leaders to inform, "educate," and manipulate public opinion. The division of powers between executive and legislative branches has added another area of confusion and conflict. The nation's peculiar approach to foreign policy has long bemused and befuddled foreign observers, producing sometimes ingenious efforts to influence the U.S. political process.

Despite its claims to moral superiority and disdain for Old World practices, the United States throughout its history has behaved more like a traditional great power than Americans have realized or cared to admit. U.S. political leaders have energetically pursued and zealously protected interests deemed vital. In terms of commerce and territory, they have been aggressively and relentlessly expansionist. From Louisiana to the Florida, Texas, California, and eventually Hawaii, they fashioned the process of infiltration and subversion into a finely tuned instrument of empire, using the presence of restless American settlers in nominally foreign lands to establish claims and gain additional territory. During the Cold War, when the nation's survival seemed threatened, they scrapped traditional notions of fair play, intervening in the affairs of other nations, overthrowing governments, even plotting the assassination of foreign leaders.

Popular notions to the contrary, the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy. In the space of a little over 200 years, it conquered a continent, established dominance over the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean areas, helped win two World Wars, prevailed in a half-century Cold War, and extended its economic influence, military might, popular culture, and "soft power" throughout much of the world. By the beginning of the 21st century, it had attained that "strength of a Giant" Washington had dreamed of.

Ironically, as the nation grew more powerful, the limits to its power became more palpable, a harsh reality for which Americans were not prepared by history. The nation's unprecedented success spawned the notion that it could do anything it set its mind to. Success came to be taken for granted. Despite its vast wealth and military power, the United States had to settle for a stalemate in the Korean War. It could not work its will in Vietnam or Iraq, nations whose complex societies and idiosyncratic histories defied its efforts to reshape them, causing frustration and disillusionment at home.

The emergence of a new 21st century threat in the form of international terrorism and the devastating September 11, 2001 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscored another hard reality: power does not guarantee security. On the contrary, the greater a nation's global influence, the greater its capacity to provoke envy and anger; the more overseas interests it has, the more targets it presents to foes and the more it has to lose. America's unparalleled power could not assure the freedom from fear its founders had dreamed of. Post-9/11 difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan underscored a fundamental "lesson" of geopolitics, that power, no matter how great, has limits. America's unipolar moment turned out to be fleeting. By the end of the first decade of the new century, experts were again speaking of a nation in decline.
-INTRODUCTION: From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford History of the United States) (George C. Herring)

An even casual student of American history isn't likely to find much new in this volume of the outstanding Oxford History of the United States, but the thematic presentation of familiar material does offer some refreshing insights. To begin with, Mr. Herring makes it clear just how central international relations have been to the supposedly isolationist US, beginning with the vital role that obtaining French assistance played in winning the Revolution. Likewise, while we tend to consider Manifest Destiny and the manner in which the original 13 states spread out across the continent and beyond through a domestic lens, it was obviously very much a process that consisted of conflict with foreign nations and peoples. Even the Civil War, which seems at first glance a purely internal matter, saw much jockeying for support abroad. And despite tariffs and bouts of protectionism and nativism, our Anglo-American capitalism has guaranteed that we'd stay involved in international matters. In all these areas, Mr. Herring reminds us that foreign policy was not something that suddenly became an American concern around the time of WWI and thereafter for the rest of the 20th century, but was important even in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The book also makes excellent use of the intertwining American themes of the Empire of Liberty and the City on a Hill--the enduring competition between our universal democratic ideals and our parochial fear of being corrupted by our involvement with alien affairs (see also Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State. After all the recent hysteria from Democrats, Realists, and the Right about how George W. Bush's campaign to Reform the Islamic World in our own image was antithetical to American history and ideals, it's enormously useful to have a historian trace the direct line from Jefferson and the Declaration through our history to W's democratic evangelism. Indeed, with American history laid out as it is here, it becomes obvious that while we do go through periodic bouts of isolation, xenophobia, what have you, they all end with us being summoned back to our moral duty as we put down aboriginal barbarism, African piracy, our own slavery, European Imperialism, Nazism, Communism, and now Islamicism. Some of these campaigns have required that we be attacked or depended on political leaders manufacturing cases for war out of supposed attacks, but one of the best bits in the book comes when Mr. Herring shows that it was a real sense of revulsion at the amorality of detente that saw us ditch the policies of LBJ/Nixon/Ford and early Jimmy Carter in favor of the intervention and confrontation of Carter's last years and the Reagan administration.

All of which brings us to the final theme that binds the text together, the fact that our foreign relations have been remarkably successful, despite the occasional setback or mistake. For the unavoidable truth of the past several centuries is that the rest of the world has become ever more like us: liberal democratic, protestant, and capitalist. Suppose we were to accept the arguments of anti-Americans foreign and domestic--that we don't and have never cared about liberalization abroad; that we are inept in war and peace; that we are racist, xenophobic, isolationist, etc.; that progress in other parts of the world depend on the brilliance of foreign leaders not our inevitable blundering (as even Mr. Herring sort of argues in elevating Mikhail Gorbachev to a position that reality disproves)--we would nonetheless be confronted by the odd eventuality that not only are we the world's unchallenged uberpower and a magnet for immigrants from every nation, but every one of the ism's that we battled either has been or is in thee process of being defeated on the battlefield and rejected in the streets and at the polls. It's all well and good to complain about a whiggish interpretation of history, but what if the Whigs just keep winning?

When Mr. Herring finished his book folks were still, foolishly, convinced that we were losing the WoT in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Had he read the history he wrote here more closely he might have been more confident.

Grade: B+