Interesting, but biased

books:


	• Profiles in Folly: History's Worst Decisions and Why They Went Wrong Alan Axelrod Sterling, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Interesting, but biased

Many of the chapters are interesting, and I was skipping at first to read the topics that interested me more. As I read about 50% of the book, it became crystal clear that the author is so biased against George W Bush, that it calls into questions his conclusions elsewhere in the book. He even uses a chapter on Buchanan before the Civil War to take a shot at Bush by claiming that historians for the most part agree Buchanan was the worst president (if this assessment is true, I honestly hadn't heard it before) up until the two terms of George W. How can he even pretend to know how history will truly judge Bush when the man isn't even out of his office yet?

There is also another chapter on the Tonkin Gulf and Persian Gulf, and he concludes the chapter by writing that the lesson from Iraq is it shows the danger of electing a barely competent, cocksure ideologue, but then goes on to say that Kennedy and Johnson were essentially wise and smart men that still made wrong decisions but had their hearts in the right place. How biased is that? And the Bush description above is almost verbatim.

I am no big Bush fan at all, but how can one trust the judgments and conclusions of an author that makes it clear he has a political ax to grind or he can't see beyond his own political philosophy? There are also several chapters just about events in the Bush administration as well.

I enjoyed many chapters of this book, but once I read all these statements in other chapters, it definitely made me have no desire to finish the book or to really have a lot of faith in his conclusions overall.

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Using the same engrossing anecdotal format that has proved so popular in Profiles in Audacity, Alan Axelrod now turns to the dark side of audacious decision-making: those choices that, in retrospect, were shockingly wrongheaded. Although Axelrod investigates some dumb decisions by stupid people and some evil decisions by evil people, the overwhelming majority of these decisions were made by good, smart people whose poor judgment produced disastrous, often irreversible results. The 35 compelling and often poignant stories, which range from ancient times to today, include: The Trojan Horse; the Children?s Crusade; the sailing of the Titanic, and the false belief that it just couldn?t sink; Edward Bernays?s 1929 campaign to recruit women smokers; Neville Chamberlain?s appeasement of the Nazis; Ken Lay?s deception with Enron; and even the choice to create a ?New Coke? and fix what wasn?t broke. As with Profiles in Audacity, the deftly drawn vignettes will pique interest, satisfy curiosity, give pleasure, and present valuable lessons. And in addition to offering the same insightful analysis of the decision-making process, Folly also includes objective post-mortems that explain what went wrong and why. These are cautionary tales?albeit with exquisite twists ranging from acerbic to horrific.

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