Book Review: "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything" by Rosa Brooks

I've recently read How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything by Rosa Brooks. It's a moderately long book about the institutional culture of the military, the historical and present perceptions of the military and its relationship with peacetime society, the evolving notions of war & peace, and the issues facing the military in today's domestic politics and international uncertainty. The thesis of the book is that while societies have historically tried to neatly separate war & peace spatially as well as temporally, such a dichotomy is rarely clear in practice, and the state of low-grade perpetual war in which the US is currently engaged, especially with regard to the adversaries we face, is in many ways surprisingly similar to the history of wars before the emergence of well-defined nation-states in Europe; moreover, issues like mission creep and a shifting political & financial emphasis away from civilian foreign engagement toward military engagement, in conjunction with adversaries having access to technologies and the fruits of globalization that allow them to attack the US from afar with unprecedented ease, has caused the military to take on roles for which it was not built (in the form in which it exists now), further blurring the lines between civilian versus military roles and war versus peace.

I really enjoyed reading this book overall. Although it's a little longer, the writing is clear and accessible, and the stories & anecdotes interwoven with more formal reports & studies make the progression of the book engaging. Additionally, I feel like the author's background of having grown up in an anti-war family and still retaining a somewhat skeptical eye with respect to military action/growth while also having worked in the Pentagon and in similar roles at other institutions for as long as she did lends her credibility when discussing the subtleties & nuances of the US military, its foreign policy, and its institutional culture. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in current US affairs; follow the jump to see a few other thoughts about this book.

Book Review: "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage

I recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. It's a brief history about the technical development of the telegraph, developments in telegraph operations, its uses, its rise, and its eventual decline. It particularly goes into the various ways that optical and then electrical telegraph systems were developed by different independent inventors, the difficulties in laying cables for long-distance telegraphy, and the ramifications of the telegraph for business, politics, military actions, newspapers, and day-to-day communications among ordinary people (despite the usual hype of that time about how instant communication would bring people together and effect world peace), comparing these issues to the issues people care about with regard to the Internet, given their similar network structures (though do note that this book was written in the late 1990s, so the author couldn't have even imagined things like Google, Facebook, or Twitter at that time). It's a short book that is a fairly engaging and fast-paced read throughout, so I'd recommend it; my only minor complaint is that the discussion of messaging through pneumatic tubes, while certainly relevant to the chronological history of the telegraph, seems to be a bit of a distraction from the main point of how relatable the 19th century telegraph system would be to users of today's Internet. Follow the jump to see a few more points about the book.