When I was in prep school, our history teacher was big in giving us a lot of diverse material to read about each of the events that we studied. I remember she gave us some chapters from the book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy, when we studied the events of World War II.
The analysis, mostly economical, stuck with me and one day I decided it was time to read this book in its entirety. That was almost 10 years ago…
The copy laid in the bookshelf, crossed the Pacific twice as we moved to Sydney and back, but finally the time came to tackle this 600 pager.
The book is dense, but it is awesome. It recounts the history of the “Great Powers” from 1500 to 1980 and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of each state in the course of each of the military and non-military struggles. Starting from the Habsburg Spain, through Louis XIV’s and then Napoleon’s France, to Britain of the 1800, the rise of Prussia, and the eventual bipolar world of United States and Soviet Union.
By the book’s ending the Cold War was still unresolved, so you might as well skip the whole last chapter of Kennedy’s “predictions”. As I mentioned, for each conflict, there is a section dedicated to each country’s position, which can be revealing like in the case of Japan and its reasons for initiating its attack on Pearl Harbor. There is also a LOT of economic data for the countries presented in numerous tables, which sometimes are impressive (like in the case of Germany’s production output from 1933 – 1939) but they may or may not turn the reader off.
Anyway, that’s all I got, it is only $15 bucks and its very good work.
- Federico.
2 comments:
Si fuera buena escritora, ya hubieras leido Adam... digo, te aventaste 600 hojas de economia!
Tengo un soft spot para estos libros de historia. Pero ya voy a seguir con la saga de Don Michael!
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