The Price of Proxy Wars

Michael Burleigh focuses mainly on the British experience, but as you can see from the image, the American experience figures heavily into his new account of Small Wars, Far Away Places. Burleigh offers a catalog of failures and a handful of qualified "successes" in what has been a very long Cold War since the end of World War II, linking past and present regimes and the support they have received from one side or the other (in some cases both) along the way.

The current situation in Syria is a vivid example of the lingering manifestations of the Cold War, as the Cyrillic lettering on the stores of chemical weapons dates back to the Soviet era, and Syria's foreign minister has expressly said that these weapons weren't meant as a deterrent of American-backed Israeli invasion. As a result, the current Russian leadership had to step in and essentially offer the Assad regime a way out of the impasse, since its predecessors has essentially created the situation.

Of course, the US, Britain and France have found themselves in similar situations since the Cold War ostensibly ended with the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the repercussions are still felt in Eastern Europe and the Caucuses with thwarted independence bids like that in Chechnya, and the divisions created when NATO interceded in the Balkan Wars.

Burleigh focuses mainly on the past (1945-65), recapping proxy wars fought during the Cold War, and hopefully shedding some light on current conflicts.

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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