The fifty-year wound Book

It's rare that an author's political biases so strongly influence my feelings on a book. But Derek Leebaert's fervent beliefs don't leak through - they splatter the pages with his bias. He's obsessed with proving the military-industrial complex doesn't exist - don't tell Eisenhower! (Not to mention that the technology he praises in the latter parts of the book only exists because of massive state military funding.) America's militarism is dismissed because it's not like Prussia's - I guess things are only bad if they are the worst thing they can be? The Great Leap Forward killed 43 million people, which is apparently totally not demographically impossible... (My eyes are rolling pretty hard as I am writing this, as you might guess.)

But the icing on the cake goes to the section on page 353 where, after talking about the American war in Vietnam, he goes on to say: "It was in Czechoslovakia that upheaval against real imperialism drew unusual courage from the young." (Emphasis mine.) His casualty figures for that? 90.

America can kill hundreds of thousands or millions in a war to retain geopolitical control of a country, but that's not really imperialism, guys!

So yeah, that should explain the one star. What could have been a good book, ruined by the author's inability to account for and control his biases.

Also, my notes say "the missile gap was totally cool", and I don't quite know what that means, but I am including it anyways because it wouldn't surprise if any of the ways you can interpret that are true.