Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 2 May

First off, there’s the power outage problem with my website, for which I apologize. Our host apparently had some power situation problems and that killed the site for all Saturday and into Sunday. My webmaster blew too much of his day worrying over it, as did I (plus the usual obsessive checking of the Amazon ranking), which is sad, because the overall response to the book has been great and that’s what we need to concentrate on.

Here’s a couple of nice plugs that brightened my day.

First comes from John Smart, head of the Institute for Accelerating Change in an interview on line with James Pethokoukis of U.S. News.com (online version of U.S. News & World Report). At the end of the interview Smart is asked about good books on the future, and this is what he says.

Next News: What is the last book you read that gave you some insight into the road ahead?

Smart: I read quite a lot, so let me give you two. For sociopolitical, read Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map, 2004. It's a brilliant portrait of the convergent security goals for technologically advanced countries in coming years: to shrink the gap with the remaining disconnected, poorly networked, economically under-integrated countries on this planet. Like the ozone hole, the gap will steadily disappear over the next two generations, and there will be many challenges to this monumentally worthy task. For science, read Life's Solution, 2003, by Simon Conway Morris, who marshals some of the best evidence yet that the universe is not a random accident, that the physics and chemistry of Earth is developmentally tuned to create human beings. Excellent work.

Smart emailed me recently, asking me to keynote at his annual fall conference at Stanford. I would automatically said yes, but here’s the rub. Looks like my spouse Vonne and I may get our referral for our adopted baby girl from China in late July or early August, meaning we’d travel sometime in September, the month of the conference. Knowing what a commitment it is to be a keynoter, I’m not sure what to do. If Smart can live with the uncertainty, I will do my best to keep the date. If not, I will have to beg off. We have a rule in our house about the last always coming first, and that means baby will always trump. Still, if it doesn’t work out, I will have to find some nice way to pay back Mr. Smart for the plug.

Second nice thing from the online world is an impromptu review from Byrd’s Brain. Like Tristero, Byrd gets an advance copy of the book in the hopes he will review it and maybe write something in his blog. Unlike Tristero, Byrd actually reads the book, overcoming his expectations, he admits, which makes his review all the more interesting. What’s nice about the review is that he really focuses on the connectedness argument, finding that one theme to be enough to pull him through a book in which he doesn’t agree with everything, and yet he sees some real utility to the approach and logic. That’s the sort of read I give books: I will skip over all the little things I don’t like about the text and focus on the one or two big things that I can really take away. So a 95% “bad” book with 5% of something really interesting becomes a book “with one great idea” for me. I guess I’m always just looking for more tools in my tool kit, preferring to leave the point-by-point criticism to others, so Byrd’s review is one I readily recognize, and it makes me feel good on a day I can’t seem to get it up . . . my site, I mean.

Third happy bit came from Neil Nyren, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Putnam, those wonderful people who get bookstores all over America to prominently display my book on that one bookcase or table with “new, non-fiction” is to be found. It’s the review from Booklist, which is library-oriented. It goes like this:

“It has been generally recognized that the end of the cold war and the emerging threat of international terrorism presented new challenges in planning American diplomatic and military strategy. What has often been lacking is a coherent, integrated vision that assesses the new threats to American interests and provides a comprehensive plan for coping with them. Barnett, a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, presents his operating theory, which sees the principal threat to American security arising from dysfunctional or so-called failed states, which provide fertile ground for the recruitment and sustenance of terrorists. On the other hand, as such past adversaries as Russia and China are integrated into global economic and political systems, they are less threatening. To counter these threats, Barnett suggests some bold, even revolutionary, changes in our military structure and in the dispersion and utilization of our forces. Of course, both his analyses and remedies are open to debate, but Barnett’s compelling assertions are worthy of strong consideration and are sure to provoke controversy.—Jay Freeman

There. That’s enough self-love for today. Amazon has rebounded back up to 210, and I promise not to check . . . yes, still at 210 . . . anymore past . . . yes, still at 210 . . . right . . . 210 again . . . now!