Saturday, March 29, 2008

What is Jeremi Suri reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Jeremi Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century and other books.

One title tagged in his entry:
Nicholas Carr's provocative book, The Big Switch. Carr analyzes how we are living through a second revolution in power comparable to the development of mass electrical utilities in the late nineteenth century. In our contemporary world, computing power is migrating to large utilities like Google. This democratization of computing power makes it cheaper, but also more open to monopoly and manipulation. Carr's book wonderfully mixes historical analysis with future prognostication. [read on]
For more on Carr's book, see: The Page 99 Test: The Big Switch.

Jeremi Suri is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. His publications include The Global Revolutions of 1968 and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente.

Learn more about Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and read an excerpt, at the Harvard University Press website.

Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderance of Power, on Henry Kissinger and the American Century:
Suri has provided a brilliant and balanced portrait of Henry Kissinger. Shaped by his childhood in Germany, his adolescence in New York, and his wartime experiences in the army, Kissinger was forever the outsider, indelibly influenced by his Jewishness, even as he became the consummate insider. Suri incisively analyzes the qualities that made Kissinger so attractive to patrons like Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, but also skillfully examines the flaws that will forever tarnish Kissinger's legacy.
The Page 99 Test: Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

Author Interviews: Jeremi Suri.

Writers Read: Jeremi Suri.

--Marshal Zeringue