(Broadside, $28)
“There’s some obvious, Jay Leno–level joke to be made about Donald Rumsfeld writing a book about decisions,” said Adam Sternbergh in Bloomberg Businessweek. No matter what else the two-time U.S. defense secretary has accomplished in his long career, “your most recent memory of him” surely is as “the publicly prickly advocate of the now-by-nearly-all-accounts-disastrous invasion of Iraq.” The man has been compiling nuggets of leadership wisdom since he was a boy stuffing notecards in a shoebox, though, and his greatest-hits collection does provide some interesting reading. One of his aphorisms—“If you’re working from your in-box, you’re working on other people’s priorities”—is now posted above my computer screen.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
But “Rumsfeld didn’t screw up everything,” said Spencer Ackerman in Wired.com. He pioneered data-enhanced warfare, which has proved to be “a huge battlefield advantage.” And his reluctance to engage in nation-building in Afghanistan might have allowed the Taliban to regroup, “but can anyone really argue in 2013 that Rumsfeld’s instincts there were wrong?” Besides, he offers many legitimate kernels of wisdom, such as this: “Rules cannot be a substitute for judgment.” Never, in fact, “has an author’s life more precisely demonstrated that point.”
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”