The No Asshole Rule, Tous les soleils

I read two very different books yesterday. The first was yet another French novel about Italy, Tous les soleils, by Bertrand Visage, and then a management book regarding difficult workplaces, with the catchy title The No- Asshole Rule. The novel was unremarkable. It didn't leave much of an impression on me, except that I noticed it was a male author with a heroine. I always watch more closely to see if the men actually get it. This one did. The management book by Robert Sutton was written very clearly and simply. I r ead in an hour. It was interesting to the extent that it identified some of the patterns of a difficult person in a workplace. What interested me was the fact that this type of behavior may be catching, and also that there are some systemic chances of improving the situations, although only over the long term.

Keegan's Price of Admiralty, Six Armies in Normandy

So I have completed the reading of all of John Keegan's books. His Price of Admiralty was quite good, I particularly enjoyed his recounting of the battle of Midway. I also enjoyed the Canadian chapter in his book on the battle of Normandy. His writing was excellent, and he does have the occasional insight worthy of a master.

Keegan, Malraux, Apollinaire, Moliere, Jasmin

I was traveling and during various legs of my trip, I read some poetry, Guillaume Apollinaire 's Alcools, and a collection of Quebec poets, most of whom I didn't know. Apollinaire was more to my taste. I also read Moliere's great satire of religiosity, Tartuffe. I had read it before, and didn't get so much out of it on the second read. I also read Andre Malraux colonial novel, La voie royale. Claude Jasmin, a television writer since, also wrote an innocuous novel, La corde au cou. Beyond that, I also read Keegan's Fields of Battle, which is more of a travelogue for North American battlefields than anything else -- I didn't find his reminiscences about them particularly illuminating since they were more personal, and his comments about how great French Canada is because its women are charming and self-confident, well, I could live without. I am now reading a biography of Alexander of Tunis, the WWII general, by Nigel Nicolson. It is so far lacking in insight or depth. I am hoping some of the other books on my shelf about WWII will be more of greater quality.

Keegan: Barbarossa, History of World War I, Our World and War; Codevilla and Seabury's War

Keegan's First World War was good, but it was not as insightful as his Face of Battle or his Reith Lectures, War and Our World. The Reith lectures are worth reading for anyone: they contain the essence of Keegan's thinking, evidently prepared and given when his ego was in check. This is a good thing. I am now reading his book on military intelligence, and it is hard to imagine anyone discussing the First Crusaders and still managing to give to the reader the impression of self-importance. Barbarossa is quite a short essay, with much more space given to pictures than words, but then, this is a book in a series of illustrated histories. One of those pictures, of Russian women making a fire to thaw the soil before erecting a steel barrier during the Battle of Moscow in 1941, speaks volumes. It is hard to believe that I got a PhD in strategic studies without knowing how much the Russians had paid for the WWII victory.

Codevilla and Seabury's War is a good read, and a cogent lesson for anyone who wants to apply the same prism to too many events or problems. These authors work admirable well, but they apply the prism of war to all aspects of international and domestic politics, and it just doesn't fit in that neatly.

Keegan's Battle for History, Churchill

Battle is a 120-page long literature review about the great histories of World War II. It was interesting as a source of more books to read, but otherwise not that interesting. Churchill's life, after the insights Keegan is capable of in Face of Battle, was also disappointing. However, it gave me the idea to go online and find Churchill's speeches on the web. I'm now reading Keegan's history of World War I.