My Short Reading List - Foreign Policy

As you might have guessed, I am a bibliophile.  I collect not only physical books but also lists of them: favorite books of various genres, books I recommend, books I'd like to read.  At one point my Amazon Wish List fulfilled this last function.  In some sense it still does.  But over the last several years this Amazon list has grown far faster than I could possibly keep up with.  It has been subdivided into various daughter lists, each of which now grows at a similarly impossible pace.  It is no longer primarily a collection of titles I would like to own or even read any time soon; rather, it is home to various titles I would like to remember for various reasons, mostly because they come strongly recommended by authorities I trust (though, admittedly, often very diverse authorities).

Hoping that perhaps others could make use of this conglomeration, even if I can do so only rarely, I have decided to share these lists here, for your perusing pleasure, in several installments, beginning with foreign policy.  I think you'll find them a far-flung bunch.  Perhaps you'll see something of interest to you and pick it up.  If you do, please, let me know what you thought.  And if you've already read some of these titles, likewise, please, share a short review.


Military History, pre-1900.  So vast is my interest in military history that I eventually had to bifurcate it.  This list runs the gammut from the ancient world, through the medieval period, all the way to the likes of the American Civil War.  It includes Michael Decker's The Byzantine Art of War, William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, Robert Tonsetic's Special Operations in the American Revolution, and others.

Military History, 1900-present.  This list is my natural intellectual home.  My dissertation on the origins of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) included discussions of conflicts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia in the four decades preceding the Second World War and how lessons from those conflicts were applied by the Allies.  This list covers similar ground.  It's heavy on the Second World War and the British Empire in the 20th century (yes, including decolonization).  It includes a look at the Polish-Soviet War, studies of the role of the US Navy in the Allied Intervention against the Bolsheviks and on the Yangtze in the 1930s, several works on Japan and its war in China, and a history of the Stauffenberg family, one member of which tried to assassinate Hitler (about whom I have written).  Other intriguing reads on this list include David French's The British Way of Counter-Insurgency and an account of Karen rebels in Burma (for whom I have a soft spot).  The list also includes works on the Global War on Terror.

Diplomacy & International Affairs.  This list includes theoretical works (such as The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Security), books on historical case studies (including Foreign Affairs and the Founding Fathers and The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the Treaty of Berlin), and biographies of both American and foreign statesmen (among them Castlereagh, T. E. Lawrence, and the little-known Frank McCoy).  You'll see that, among other topics, I'm intrigued by Southeast Asia.

Intelligence.  Much of this list's potential material is covered in the above categories, but it includes a few intriguing titles, some critical (e.g. The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture), some historical (The Archaeologist Was a Spy), others decidedly non-Western (Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere).

The Shield of Faith - An Update

Six years ago I wrote a post about St. Paul's admonition to the Ephesians to "hold faith as a shield, to quench all [the] flaming arrows of the Evil One." In that post, I highlighted the communal value of shields in the Greek-speaking world, as when wounded Odysseus "called... [and] Aias came near him, carrying like a wall his shield, and stood forth beside him" to protect him from the Trojans. At the time, I thought this intercessory quality of faith, by which we are protected by the faith of our brothers, was a novel reading of this passage. Not so, I discovered.

Around AD 740, three monks - Denehard, Lullus, and Burchard - who assisted St. Boniface in his missionary work in Germany, wrote to Abbess Cuniburg in England. One of their requests to her was that "you will not refuse to shelter us against the cruel darts of sin with the shield of your prayer," a clear reference to Ephesians 6:16.

As Christians are suffering persecution around the world, and in many cases dying for the faith, please remember them in your prayers and extend the shield of your faith over them.