As a former student of Dr Eric Herring, I can recommend this book for beginners of International Security as well as for professionals. If you intend to study this field, this book will be where you should begin and will always come back. First, put all the perspectives laid out in this comprehensive work into your mind and then work on some other literatures listed on its bibliography, and you will feel that you are learning something systematically. Believe me, this work is a first step for you towards the great understanding of this field.

You want to understand the theory of international politics? Well, then, first try Kenneth Waltz's "Theory of International Politics", then go to Robert Keohane's "Neorealism and its Critics", then read David Baldwin's "Neorealism and Neoliberalism", and finally peruse this work. "The Logic of Anarchy" anatomises every part of Waltz's "T of P", criticises it wholly, and improves it to the extent to which I doubt there will be any further refinement. It is the most important and best response to Waltz's work!

The majority of the reviews seem to focus on the reviewer's feelings: towards the author, his previous works, "it was too simple," "too complicated," "repetitive," and so on. However, if you're not familiar with mind-maps (which are creative techniques used to organize thoughts, identify key ideas, link themes, and remember more effectively, while using the both sides of the brain), you might think of it as a gimmicky New-Agey concept without practical applications. In other words, not useful, interesting but not useful. I'd just like to give personal endorsement. I've used mind maps for about twenty years to organize engineering projects at work, remember books I've read, identify daily goals, learn chess opening ideas, outline papers I'm writing, and identify the important from the trivial. This book does have flaws in that Buzan has already written it in his earlier works, and the title suggests to more impressive results than can be delivered ("maximize your brain's potential"). You won't become a genius, you will still have to work at thinking, you'll just have an additional tool to help you. Mind maps are fun, easy-to-use, useful ways to organize and retain information and generate ideas. Linear notes just don't jog the memory. It's still amazing to me how a hastily drawn mind map on an article, book, movie, lecture - a map I'll scribble with stupid little drawings and doodles and throw away days later - can help me remember so much years later !! It works. I use it. It helps.

In the Mind Map Book, Tony Buzan describes the use of Mind Maps, or radiant thinking, for learning and brainstorming. He gives many examples of ways the Mind Mapping technique can be used, from creating annual Mind Maps of goals to mapping presentations to mapping school notes and daily agendas.

I found this an interesting and in-depth book about Mind Mapping. However, I don't see that the Mind Mapping technique is practical for every situation the author seems to think it is. For example, included in the book is a sheet taken from the author's day planner; he's drawn the day, coloring blocks of times, drawing little planes during times he's flying, drawing dolphins, little men, etc., using various colored pens and highlighters, outlining and doodling. Who on earth has the time for all of this? And what happens when something unexpected happens and you need to rearrange your schedule?

I purchased this book mostly because I am interested in using the Mind Mapping technique to aid in college; however, it's the same issue as above - who has the time to draw detailed, multicolored, 3-D pictures?

The author repeatedly mentions the so-called great minds of the past, and includes samples from their notes. However, on reviewing the samples, few to none of them appear to resemble the Mind Map techniques Tony uses; their notes are more traditional notes with interspersed pictures and symbols. This would seem more reasonable for notetaking, whereas I can see that Mind Mapping in greater detail would be helpful for other things, such as preparing a speech, brainstorming to write a novel or paper, brainstorming with a group in a work environment, mapping goals, and so on.

I think this is a good overview of the possibilities of Mind Mapping, but that it will be best used if you adapt it to your needs rather than rigidly trying to use the techniques exactly as the author lays them out.

Tony Buzan invented the techniques. Many others have written about it with or without giving him full credit for it. In any case, this is the only book you need to read about this subject. It covers all the aspects and applications. It covers the basic rules.

I have about 10 years of mindmapping experience. I mindmap today a lot less than I used to during my first 3 years. I think the best application of mindmapping is for studying, reviewing, and memorizing materials. If I had known about mindmapping when I went through school(s), I would have done a lot better than I did. Catching mindmapping a bit later in life, it allowed me to study a lot of new stuff much quicker than I would have otherwise. There is really something about involving your whole brain in the learning process, instead of just the left one. And, mindmapping does that naturally for you.

As the two authors recognize, this work is an International Relations [”IR”] textbook, and written as such; but they hope “to attract interest and comment from historical sociologists, archeologists, world historians and anyone trying to understand humankind as a whole” [precisely, with the purpose of understanding as much as possible of our world,...The authors, after researching what world history has to offer to IR theory, also examine what IR theory has to offer world history: “The most obvious answer to that questions is the idea of international system itself. As we hope we have demonstrated, this idea, and its associated concepts of dominant units, scale, interaction capacity, process, and structure, provide an extraordinarily useful theoretical framework for studying world history. These concepts can produce a “thick” conception of international system that has the potential to provide a rich and distinctive account of world history that captures main features that are missed or obscured by existing approaches. The concept in our toolkit are well suited to the broad-brush approach that world history requires and offers as much as, if not more than, any of the available alternatives”.

I have rated it four starts. Considering its content, I think it should be five; considering its readability, two (sometimes falling to one, sometimes raising to three).

P.S. I think that reproducing a Synopsis of this book (that may be found in the web page corresponding to the same book offered by Amazon.co.uk) is worth it: “This text tells the 60,000 year story of how humankind evolved from a scattering of hunter-gatherer bands to highly integrated global international political economy. It traces the evolution of ever-wider economic, societal and military-political international systems, and the interplay between these systems and the tribes, city states, empires, and modern states into which humans have organised themselves. Buzan and Little marry a wide range of mainstream International Relations theories to a world historical perspective. They mount a stinging attack on International Relations as a discipline, arguing that its Eurocentrism, historical narrowness, and theoretical fragmentation have reduced almost to nothing both its cross-disclipinary influence and its ability to think coherently about either the past or the future. Seeking to emulate and challenge the cross-disciplinary influence of the world systems model, the book recasts the study of International Relations into a macro-historical perspective, shows how its core concepts work across time, and sets out a new theoretical agenda and a new intellectual role for the discipline”.

I don't see how it's possible to see that far ahead. To presume to spot trends well into 7000 A.D. is just absurd. Stephen Hawking doubts the human race can even last another century, and I don't think he is an oracle either.

Last year a medium sized asteroid was discovered just a couple of weeks before it made its nearest approach to Earth. Now if that rock had hit southern England, let's say, tens of millions of people would have died on impact, and Britain would have been wiped off the face of the Earth. The fact that it had been discovered only weeks before meant that we could have done nothing to prevent it from hitting us. If it had done so, nobody would pay much attention to Sept. 11 anymore.

This example illustrates the utter meaninglessness of looking into the crystal ball by studying even the broad trends. Things can happen which no one can think of, and everything changes. To their credit the authors devote only one third of the book to their crystal ball, but it's still an exercise in futility.

To cite further examples, no one in the early nineteenth century except de Tocqueville saw the rise of both America and Russia. He was only one hundred years ahead of his times - and that's already very impressive. Who by the turn of the century would have thought we could not only fly, but even go to the Moon? And hardly anyone knew then what treasures lay below the ground in the Arabian desert - King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud would have preferred to find water instead. But without cars oil would not have been of much use. Who could have predicted these bone-dry, dirt-poor wanderers in the sand would become the world's richest people? Certainly not the Saudis themselves. And 9/11 could not have happened without Saudi money (whether they liked it or not).

A series of accidents led to a radically unbelievable outcome.

If we had such trouble seeing just one hundred years ahead, the notion you can see anything at all several thousand years ahead is baloney.

No less an authority than Jack Welch, the legendary ex-Chairman of GE, makes it clear in his memoirs that you can't see far into the future. Read his book, Straight from the Gut (which incidentally was published on 9/11/01, an event which even he could not have imagined.) At the end of the book he made some predictions, which he implied were foisted on him by the publisher; but he never said they would necessarily come true.

For historical background I recommend three excellent books on world history: William H. McNeill's The Rise of the West, J.M. Roberts's Penguin History of the World, and Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Margaret Thatcher's Statecraft, Jack Welch's Straight from the Gut, and the latest books by Eric Hobsbaum, Joseph Nye and Henry Kissinger offer intelligent (if not necessarily correct) perspectives on contemporary world and clues to possible future developments. These are good books, much better than this one. All these authors offer some hints on the future, but they never claim to have the last word, let alone seeing thousands of years ahead.

Otherwise, read science fiction instead. Better still, read natural science and standard newspapers.

You are what you eat, they say. Read junk like this, and your brain will be full of it.

The book actually is in three parts - the first is a summary of human history, the second is a analysis of current trends, and the third is a series of looks backward from several points in the future. To be honest, I was hoping for a little more emphasis on the future history part (it's so hard to find any kind of future history, let alone good future history), but the book is actually pretty good as a whole.