Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Back home now after travel stretching back to last Sunday (RI, then TN), and as usual, much to catch up on.

Was fun to travel through so many airports and see Warren Buffet's smiling face, reminding me of the column in USN&WR. There's nothing quite like knowing you're in each of those magazine stores. This year has been nice in that regard: the May issue of Esquire, then the July, then this, and next the October issue of Esquire (fact-checking complete and now we're just working pages and illustrations on both pieces). Have no plans right now for anything else with Esquire through end of year, but possibly one more before I settle into the business of writing Vol. III in January and February.

For now, I am working my way down the big pile of books I have.

The pile completed and teed up for use:

1) Chanda's "Bound Together"
2) Friedman's "Moral Consequences of Economic Growth"
3) Prahalad's "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid"
4) Walsh's "The American West"
5) McMillan's "Nixon and Mao"
6) Yenne's "Indian Wars"
7) Kagan's "Dangerous Nation"
8) Kurlantzick's "Charm Offensive"
9) Gallula's "Counterinsurgency Warfare"
10) Pelton's "Licensed to Kill"
11) Nagl's "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife"
12) other Friedman's "World is Flat"
13) Robb's "Brave New War"
14) Coram's "Boyd"
15) Heath and Heath's "Made to Stick"
16) Tapscott and Williams' "Wikinomics"
17) Enriquez's "The Untied States of America"
18) Sachs's "End of Poverty"
19) Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts"
20) Lodge and Wilson's "Corporate Solution to Global Poverty"
21) Ayittey's "Africa Unchained"
22) Collier's "Bottom Billion"
23) Bremmer's "The J Curve" (which I just finished and loved for everything but the J curve itself, which got awful mechanistic: one thing to explain everything through connectivity/his "openness" but quite another to describe one pathway for all to follow)
24) deep into Easterly's "White Man's Burden" (which I'm loving).

Another couple-dozen I have for consideration, which I've read long before.

Another 25 or so teed up for probable reading down the road.

Of course, there's about 2500 blog posts to explore, attached to maybe 5-8,000 articles (too many piles in the office ... I move there here and there every so often to feel more organized).

This is what I've teed up for August and September (to include a very long airplane ride to and from Australia's NE coast [off Queensland, near the Great Barrier Reef] sometime soon for a World Economic Forum-sponsored meeting of the Australian Davos Club that should include virtually all of the nation's top political and military leadership--you know I'll be jacked for that brief):

1) Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds"
2) Nasr's "Shiia Revival"
3) Kynge's "China Shakes the World"
4) Prothero's "Religious Literacy"
5) Johannson's "Medici Effect"
6) Taleb's "Black Swan"
7) Goodwin's "Team of Rivals"
8) Marcus' "The Shape of Things to Come"
9) H.G. Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come"
10) Reynolds' "Army of Davids"
11) Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton"
12) Kuklick's "Blind Oracles"
13) Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of Peace"
14) Preston's "War Council"
15) Skidelsky's "Keynes"
16) Morris' "Rise and Fall of Theodore Roosevelt"
17) Blanning's "The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815" (next up).

Want that list done by Labor Day. We shall see.