Thursday, September 10, 2009

What is Bruce Coston reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Bruce Coston, author of the newly released Ask The Animals: A Vet’s-Eye View of Pets and the People They Love.

His entry begins:
My taste in books is widely variable and erratically eclectic. The following books are ones I am reading or have read in the last three months or so. They include the following:

1) Current read. The One Percent Doctrine by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Ron Suskind, and published by Simon and Schuster Paperbacks. This is a very enlightening, though perhaps acutely angled, inside account of America’s war on terror as prosecuted by the Bush administration. It is based on this reporter’s assembly of data from interviews, documents, and investigative reporting. No previous information I have heard has outlined so succinctly the foundational principles of the war on terror which were elucidated by Bush and Cheney. Within the administration this became known as the one percent doctrine: if there is even a one percent chance that an aggressive event is being contemplated by a terrorist network or rogue state, then America would respond as if the event was 100% reality. This stance was rooted in the perceived need for the public protection of Americans who, after 9/11, understood that potential attacks were possible, if not likely. Suskind posits, however, that the subsequent decisions and actions which arose from this doctrine have undermined the principles and freedoms of a democracy such as ours and has resulted in an unwarranted war...[read on]
Read excerpts and some of the early praise for Ask the Animals, and learn more about the book and author at Bruce Coston's website.

See--Coffee with a Canine: Starr and Bruce Coston.

Writers Read: Bruce Coston.

--Marshal Zeringue