What’s on your reading list?

Greetings to all Saint Rose students displaced from dorm and/or classroom until mid-January!

Like all dedicated scholars, I’m sure you’ve been keeping up on your independent reading ahead of next semester. With this in mind, I figured I’d share some of the top titles that were on my reading list this winter, and take some time to find out what’s on yours.

Recently-completed and highly recommended:

At first glance, The Limits of Power appears to be another document of the revisionist history variety. The truth is it’s very much rooted in the realist perspective, and paints a highly accurate picture of the connection or lack-there-of between American civilian and soldier. This should be required reading for all U.S. citizens. It will be especially poignant for those who struggle to understand how the multi-country, unconventional, protracted conflicts that have come to characterize modern warfare for America are allowed to persist despite their astronomical cost in terms of lives and currency. I won’t spoil the entirety of author Andrew Bacevich’s argument for you, but the crux of it is this: the easier it is for one large group of people to send a much smaller group to go and do their fighting for them, the more it’ll happen. When war is once again the business of John Q. Public (via draft or a similar mechanism), there will be much less of it.

 

 

 

Futuristic space wars between the U.S. and Japan fed by resource and trade route competition, the emergence of Mexico as a significant world power, America becoming the next Saudi Arabia…of space-based solar energy. You’ll find all this and more inside George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. The startling thing is, since Friedman is the founder of STRATFOR – a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, it’s entirely possible that the events outlined above will actually occur…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This book will teach you how to speak dog! Well…not exactly, but it will help you to grasp the hows and whys of dog behavior, and reveal new ways for you to relate to your canine companion. Author and anthrozoologist Dr. John Bradshaw says our dogs really need us to be spokespeople for them, not someone who will treat them as furry humans or followers in a pack. This book is definitely a useful tool for dog owners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what titles have been commanding your attention over the past few weeks? While you ponder that question, here’s one item that should command the attention of all soon-to-be-graduates: