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Book reviews for "Shawcross,_William" sorted by average review score:

Queen and Country : The Fifty-Year Reign of Elizabeth II
Published in Hardcover by Simon & Schuster (2002)
Author: William Shawcross
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Shattering the Myth of Monarchy
Those who believe that the institution of monarchy is archaic and serves no purpose in the modern nation-state might find Mr. Shawcross's book somewhat suprising. Employing a succinct writing style, Mr. Shawcross provides his reader with a fascinating glimpse into the woman who, by accident of birth and unforseen dynastic events, has occupied the throne of Great Britain for half a century and who, in a quiet, unassuming way, has exacted considerable influence over the politics of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and world. This book shows the error in characterizing the Queen as a mere figurehead. Indeed, her role as confidant to prime ministers, the political knowledge and wisdom she has acquired through her lengthy tenure as sovereign, her ability to lead by example, and her steadfast willingness to dedicate her life to the service of her nation and the Commonwealth, combine to produce a portrait of a woman who is anything but a token head of state.

This book successfully argues the case for monarchy. Politicians, scandals, and events come and go, but there, above it all, remains the Queen.

A Clear, Thorough Bio
I found this book very interesting. I suggest all Britons campaigning for a republic read this book. It proves how influential and important the monarchy really is. It also proves what a brilliant woman Elizabeth II is and how she has come to embody the ideal constitutional monarch. What I found most interesting is her actual involvement in British (and many Commonwealth) affairs. Most Americans think of her as a mere figurehead who opens up hospitals here and there. This is far from the truth. As she is probably the most experienced diplomat in Britain, her sage counsel to Prime Ministers has proven invaluable. I urge those who pass off Elizabeth as dispensable to read this book and see how indispensable she really is.


Biographia Literaria
Published in Textbook Binding by Oxford Univ Pr (1992)
Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Shawcross
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Interesting compendium of essays on life and literature
Coleridge is a writer/thinker whose own life and works, particularly the later ones, seem to defy the eye of future standard, especially in an age of slick convenience. He is looking for "the vast," does not ignore German idealism like so many other Brits, nor philology, and seeks the vast from the socio-political context of a well-booked, if ne'er-do-too-well, remote, clergy-trained, English townsman. Some chapters are almost unbearably (to our age) slow, but don't forget this was the era of the triple decker, and Coleridge's reading (as was his library) was varied and vast. In all it may serve best the reader who keeps STC's religious and political anachronisms in context without relinquishing their flavor. Although this is another one of those disappearing (if at times arcane) gems by dead, white, European males whom we are obliged to ignore these days, yet Coleridge's romanticism, honest pessimism, and philosophical searching will never be passe for the thoughtful. And inasmuch as this title includes some of his lesser known mature work, the rich surpise implicit in that description will happen, recurrently and rewardingly, on the thoughtful reader.


Forced Out: The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time
Published in Paperback by Random House Trade Paperbacks (1989)
Authors: Carole Kismaric, William Shawcross, Carol Kismaric, and Peter Osnos
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Spectacular!
I would rate this book like this, because I thought it was incredibly moving, the photography was some of the best I've ever seen.


Sideshow
Published in Paperback by Pocket Books (1979)
Author: William Shawcross
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How the Americans destroyed Cambodia.
In my title sentence, I basically give a summary of Shawcross's contention that Cambodia was destroyed by the United States. I think Shawcross makes good points on why the United States must bear some responsibility in the destruction of this small country. What is lacking is an even review of all the characters in the history (Khymer Rouge, Viet Cong, NVA, ARVN,
and the Thais) of Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communists have as much a stake in why Cambodia turned out as it did. I think Shawcross purposely overlooks this and points the finger at what he percieves as the evil doers of American policy--Kissinger and Nixon.
I think Shawcross does a good job of relating how the USA tried to salvage the intervention in Vietnam at the cost of destroying a small country. I think he proves that point. I also enjoyed his portrayal of all the principal American and Cambodian players in this drama. As I said, a more critical look at the Vietnamese would give this book a more even outlook. After I read this book, I understoon why Presidential Administrations did not involve Kissinger in future policy. Henry comes off as arrogant in the least, evil at the most. For more information on what happened after this time in Cambodia, please read Brother Enemy.

A book that makes you think!
I have had a lot of trouble finding this book. It had been recommened by quite a few people to me, but I had a hard time finding it.

I found it in of all places, a outdoor market in the capital of Cambodia this summer. Cambodia is great for finding bootleg copies of any books on Cambodia.

Shawcross has written a well documented, researched, and written book on Cambodia's role in the Vietnam War. It was easy to read and it certainly made you think.

Unfortunately, I disagree with the tone of the book. And ultimately I disagree with the author's point of view. But anyone interested in the Vietnam War, Nixon, or what happened in Cambodia should read this book. I ultimately disagreed with the book, you may or may not, but regardless it is a book that is well written and will make you think.

Check this book out!

One of the books which destroyed Nixon
This is a book which describes the destruction of Cambodia. During the Vietnam war the Americans thought that a large portion of the supplies and infantry of the regular units of the North Vietnamese Army were moving into South Vietnam by the use of the Ho Chi Min trail. The trail was a series of roads which rang parallel to South Vietnam though neutral Laos and Cambodia. In reality it seemed that until the events of this book most supplies for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were actually shipped by the Soviet Union through Cambodia.

Both Loas and Cambodia were neutral in the conflict and the United States faced a problem in getting them to stop the movement of troops and supplies through their territory.

The United States used the CIA to fund a private army in Laos to fight against the Pathet Lao the indigenous communist movement. In Cambodia a coup was organised to remove the government of Shinouk and to replace it with Lon Nol. Once that was done Lon Nol gave permission for the United States to bomb Cambodian territory and later for the South Vietnamese Army to mount armed raids into Cambodia.

The air raids were immensely heavy and dropped bomb loads which were similar to the entire tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany in the Second World War. The combination of the bombing and the coup led to the collapse of Cambodia's social fabric. Large numbers of peasants moved off the land to escape the bombing and swelled the capital. The American actions strengthened the hand of the local communists the Kyhmer Rouge and they started to win the civil war. This in turn led to more refugees. Towards the end the Lon Nol government was reduced to total dependence on imported food supplies flown in by the United States. I the end the Kyhmer Rouge were victorious and turned out to be one of the most murderous regimes of the century. (Some claim that on a per capita basis they were the most vicious in the 20th Century a good century for murderous regimes)

This book is an expose of what is a serious blot on the foreign policy record of the United States. It was a significant book at the time as a range of the actions carried out against Cambodia were illegal. However unlike some of the other tragedies of the last century the tragedy of Cambodia seems to be fading into the background.


Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Published in Paperback by Touchstone Books (2001)
Author: William Shawcross
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Finally, the big picture
I must begin with the disclaimer that I an not a reader of current-world-event reporting. For years, I have been frustrated by the snippets of informatioa that I get from the press: a mass grave here, a NATO strike there, a UN peace intervention somewhere else. Even if I chose to follow such events, I doubt that a coherent picture of world affairs would emerge.

I read Shawcross's DELIVER US FROM EVIL cover to cover. Finally, someone was presenting an overview of the tumultuous nineties. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Zair, East Timor, Kossovo--they are all covered in an informed, evenhanded way. The author largely leads us through the eyes of Koffi Annan, who becomes Secretary General of the UN halfway through the book. The author's obviously extraordinary access to Annan makes this vantage point vibrant, compelling, and renders coherence to apparently unrelated conflicts. World diplomacy is an exercise in frustration and this book does a great job of keeping the attention of the reader who gets this point from the beginning and who knows its ending.

Two are the principal drawbacks of this recounting of the nightmares of the nineties. Shawcross does not spend much time on international criminal justice nor on international finance. The collapse of East Asian financial systems which threatened a world-wide crisis cannot be irrelevant to all these humanitarian crises. Perhaps the relation is superficial--that insolvent goventnments cannot afford to maintain or impose peace--but it might be quite deeper, perhaps triggeming or motivating unrest in various ways.

The nineties, the book shows, were a crucial time for international criminal justice. Regional courts for war crimes were established to punish war criminals and deter atrocities. Eventually, a permanent international court for war crimes was established. Neither the function, nor the creation, nor the arguments surrounding the jurisdiction of these institutions are covered in sufficient depth. These are the drawbacks that shade an otherwise admirable account of an extraordinarily confusing decade.

A Close Examination of UN Peacekeeping Forces

A Close Examination of UN Peacekeeping Forces By David Isenberg Stars and Stripes Contributing Writer

Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

After reading this book nobody will ever again be able to contemplate a call to deploy United Nations peacekeepers without gagging. After I read it I was reminded of the saying that one is either part of the problem or part of the solution. For years people have assumed that when it came to peace and conflict issues in general and peacekeeping in specific that the United Nations was part of the solution. Perhaps it's time to change our minds. The Bible may say "Blessed are the peacemakers" but UN peacekeepers, unfortunately, are not.

In this book William Shawcross, longtime British journalist and veteran of many war zones, has written a dispassionate account of most of the major conflicts the UN has been involved in. The first part is a detailed, and at times dizzying history of UN involvement in the killing zones whose names we have seen so many times in the news: Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Chechnya, and Iraq. He analyzes, in great detail, the few, partial, tentative successes that UN Blue Helmets, such as UNTAC in Cambodia, and the far too many failures such as Rwanda, Somalia, and Sierra Leone.

The second part is a review, as seen by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan with whom Shawcross has obviously spent a great deal of time with, of the politics and diplomacy that occurred in the amorphous creature called the "international community," especially those nations that are members of the UN Security Council.

Sometimes it is hard to know which is worse; reading the accounts of the various atrocities perpetrated by the warlords and thugs posing as national leaders, i.e., Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevich, Foday Sankoh, Laurent Kabilah, or reading about the petty intrigues and bickering among the leaders of the Western governments and in the UN Secretariat.

Reading this book is like driving by a traffic accident; you are horrified by what you see but you can't keep from looking. The accounts of the enormous pressures encountered by Kofi Anan in trying to secure pledges of funds personnel, and approval for peacekeeping operations, and the obstacles encountered by UN peacekeepers from the forces who oppose their deployment, makes one appreciate that, unlike the Cold War era, there is no longer any peace to keep and precious little will to make peace.

At a time when UN forces are being captured by the hundreds by rebels in a heart of darkness like Sierra Leone one realizes that if UN peacekeeping operations could be symbolized by a car it would be the Edsel.

Though Shawcross is obviously sympathetic to the idea of UN peacekeeping he is too much the dispassionate observer to believe that current "humanitarian" interventions are a model to follow in the future. His last words are "In a more religious time it was only God whom we asked to deliver us from evil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance. That is sometimes to ask for miracles."

Deliver Us From the Evil of a Lack of Political Will
Deliver Us from a Lack of Political Will, by Peter Gantz, Partnership for Effective Peace Operations.

A review of Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

So, yes, this book is about peacekeeping, that amorphous blob of activity the international community tasks the UN with accomplishing every day in conflict zones throughout the world. It is clear that expectations far exceed what the UN is capable of delivering, as Mr. Shawcross points out early on. The UN in the nineties was tasked with bringing peace to areas where conflict had erupted, following the end of the Cold War. Mr. Shawcross does an admirable job of describing how well and how often that did not work, and how deep the failures were.

This book is not a UN bashing book, though. It certainly points out the problems at the UN, but Mr. Shawcross knows that these problems, just as the UN itself, are the creation of the member states and their political leaders. In particular, the most powerful member state, the United States, has played a spectacularly unhelpful role. Congress nearly destroyed the UN financially in the late nineties, largely driven by provincial isolationists in the Republican Party. President Clinton and his top advisors were no better, perhaps most notably during the Rwandan genocide. Muddled decisions from the administration did much to worsen crises and conflicts the world over.

Mr. Shawcross puts his finger squarely on the problem. Time after time it has been a lack of political will. The inability of the international community to summon the courage to stop the deaths of millions of blacks in Rwanda, Burundi, and other parts of Africa is one of the more despicable features of the twentieth century, and one of the examples of problems with UN peacekeeping that Mr. Shawcross covers quite well. The U.S. and other countries are simply not willing to back up words with actions.

Hard and fast solutions are not offered by Mr. Shawcross. The reader would be better directed to other works for that. (The book came out prior to the UN's own surprisingly honest and straightforward assessment of peacekeeping, the Brahimi Report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan.) But to understand the problems with UN peace operations, and to understand the fundamental root cause of these problems, the lack of political will to act, or to act well, this book is better than most. Mr. Shawcross suggests in the end that UN peace operations have too often been about asking for miracles.

But make no mistake; he does not suggest that peacekeeping should be abandoned. And certainly this book should not provoke a reader to gag at the idea of deploying peacekeepers-they should gag, however, at the antics of their elected officials. The U.S. and other countries sit at the Security Council and give the UN grand and noble tasks to save the world, but when it comes to providing the means to accomplish those tasks, failure is palpable. The abject failure of government officials to match actions to words is what we truly need deliverance from.


MURDOCH: REVISED AND UPDATED
Published in Paperback by Touchstone Books (1997)
Author: William Shawcross
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Relatively balanced business biography
Murdoch is, to say the least, one of the more controversial figures in media today. His name still inspires visions of the pitched battles that have arisen around the pieces of his empire and the ethical debates about the role of journalism and issues of media ownership. There is a tremendous amount to be learned from studying Murdoch and the way he built his kingdom, and this book is not to be missed, particularly for people studying media history or the media industry.

Shawcross presents a very balanced picture, light on both censure and praise, and manages to give enough personal detail to illuminate the public Murdoch without veering into a personal melodrama. The writing is occasionally a bit dry, but generally of a high quality & the source notes and bibliography are quite valuable in and of themselves.

A good, fairly unbiased biography, of a powerful media mogul
Although the author is a friend of Murdoch, he has written a reasonably unbiased biography. He reports facts without much personal opinion. Personally, the book only reinforced my original beliefs about Murdoch - that he is an man without morals, out to 'conquer' the globe with his media 'empire', not caring what happens to the the working man along the way, as demonstated by his orchestrating of the Wapping strike in order to sack his workforce, which the author describes in detail. Overall, a good account of the life of one of the most poweful men today.

Excellent biography.
Very well documented personal (a combination of gambling instinct and dour puritanism) and business biography of the media tycoon. The rise of Murdoch from an owner of a small newspaper in Australia to a global media tycoon. His motif: "power, not money." The power to influence political/social history through his colossal media empire. Murdoch believes that the Americanizing of the world is not only profitable for his business, but a great good in itself.
The author situates the ascent of Murdoch within the world political history (cold war, Thatcher, Reagan ...) and gives an incisive portrait of some of his collaborators: Barry Diller and Kelvin Mac Kenzie (editor of his milk cow 'The Sun').
Written with a good sense of humour, e.g. "... Giles should assume the title of Editor Emeritus ... Giles asked Murdoch what this title really meant . It's Latin, Frank. E means exit and meritus means you deserve it." Or, after Murdoch banned alcohol on the working place, someone replied "Free drunks produce better newspapers than sober slaves". The tycoon was even asked by the Vietnamese government to make communist-controlled television more popular!
Besides, the author gives a sneer at Unesco for attacking freedom of information. One minus point: on different occasions, the author refers to big financial troubles for the media empire without giving the numbers.


The Shah's Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally
Published in Hardcover by Simon & Schuster (1988)
Author: William Shawcross
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THE VIEW FROM A DISTANCE
William Shawcross is a good reporter. But in this biography he faced one problem: he knew his subject only from a distance.
His account of the Shah's illness and his final agonies is excellent because it is based on extensive interviews with the doctors who treated the exiled king.
The rest of the book, however,suffers from insufficient research and analysis.
Many of the Iranians interviewed by Shawcross told him either what he wanted to hear or what they wanted him to hear. He had no means of checking their claims by cross-examining other witnesses and/or digging into Iranian archives.(Obviously closed to him).
Read this book as a medical account of the Shah's final days. ( You learn a great deal about the type of cancer that finally killed the Shah!) But for a deeper analysis of the Shah's politics, and some speculation about his eventual place in history, go to Marvin Zonis's " Majestic Failure."
And if you want a critical, and at the same time sympathetic, Iranian view go to Amir Taheri's " The Unknown Life of the Shah" which reads like a modern version of a Greek tragedy.
I also recommend the Shah's own " Answer to History" which, although self-serving and at times annoyingly dishonest,neverthelkess , provides much insight into the soul of that complex and misunderstood man.
AN IRANIAN READER

THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY IN A UNBIASED MANNER
This book is superb, It tells the good the bad and the ugly in a fair unbaised manner which is rare for books on Iran. This book gives excellent insight onto one of history's most misunderstood figures, The Late Shah of Iran. Interviews with all the major players in the last days of The Peacock Throne. One disapointment Shawcross does not really delve very solidly into the Mossadegh era and the Shah & the CIA's role in helping the Iranian Air Force restore him to the throne. Former Queen Soraya's book is probably best for that but that book - Palace of Solitudes - is rare and was published only in Europe and not in English. All in All, if you are a interested in the life and death of the Pahlavi Dynasty and want a fair and unbiased autopsy then this is your book

100 PERCENT ACCURATE
I HAVE READ MANY BOOKS ON THE PAHLAVI DYNASTY. THIS IS ONE OF THE FEW THAT IS EXTREMELY ACCURATE. IT IS VERY INSIGHTFUL, AND HAS SO MUCH INFORMATION. A MUST READ, BUT HARD TO FIND BOOK.


Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
Published in Hardcover by New York University Press (1996)
Authors: Alain Destexhe, Alison Marschner, and William Shawcross
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Thought provoking, but...
Not bad, but a bit dry. I had some definate arguments with Dr Destexhe's contentions about the Balkan conflict, but those are best aired elsewhere. All in all though a worthwhile read for those in the International Security/Stability business (intelligence,politics, and the like)....

Required Reading
While it is possible to list dozens of examples of crimes against humanity, there are only three that meet the strict definition of "Genocide," according to Mr. Destexhe, Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders. The systematic elimination of Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 is one such instance. This concise treatise should be required reading for all human rights activists.


Kowtow! After Tianamen Square: A Plea on Behalf of Hong Kong (Chatto Counterblasts, No. 6)
Published in Paperback by Chatto & Windus (1990)
Author: William Shawcross
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you tell me
How can I rate a book I have not been able to review?


Allies: The U.S. and Europe After Iraq
Published in Hardcover by PublicAffairs (2003)
Authors: William Shawcross and Peter Osnos
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