{"id":1567,"date":"2004-10-15T10:23:41","date_gmt":"2004-10-15T14:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/10\/15\/national-book-award-surprise-finali"},"modified":"2004-10-15T10:23:41","modified_gmt":"2004-10-15T14:23:41","slug":"national-book-award-surprise-finalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/10\/15\/national-book-award-surprise-finalist\/","title":{"rendered":"National Book Award surprise finalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Last Wednesday, finalists were announced for the National Book Awards, and
\nthere’s a bit of brouhaha over the fiction finalists, because they are
\nall very small, unknown novels.
\n{pictureRef (\"\", align:”right”)}<\/p>\n

But the Tom Clancy of the nonfiction set, the 9\/11 Commission Report,
\ngot a nomination for at non-fiction award.  The first eleven (of
\nthirteen) chapters are compelling reading.  They provide,
\nalternating between action in the United States by intelliegence
\ncommunites and among the terrorist plotters, an overview of the whole
\nsituation leading up to September 11, 2001.  Not only does the
\nreport have an organization that lends itself well to narrative, but
\nthe style and tone of the report comes across as very unified, as if
\nwritten by a single author (as I suspect for this reason that it was),
\nrather than the joint product of ten or twelve people.<\/p>\n

The last two chapters are somewhat disappointing.  The solution to
\nthe ideological crisis of Islamism requires bureacratic
\nre-organization.  But the failure wasn’t just one of
\nintelligence.  When George Kennan wrote the Long Telegram in 1947,
\noutlining the structure of a US foreign policy to oppose Soviet
\nhegemony, he didn’t propose a bureacratic change, a tactic; he posed a
\nstrategic plan, that of “containment.”  The “solution” chapters of
\nthe 9\/11 report strike as missing just that element, a comprehensive
\nstrategy.  I think the bureacratic reorganization provides a
\nfairly good tactic, and the report’s suggestions should be
\nimplemented.  But it lacks an overall vision of what needs to be
\ndone, and thus doesn’t go far enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Wednesday, finalists were announced for the National Book Awards, and there’s a bit of brouhaha over the fiction finalists, because they are all very small, unknown novels. {pictureRef (, align:”right”)} But the Tom Clancy of the nonfiction set, the 9\/11 Commission Report, got a nomination for at non-fiction award.  The first eleven (of thirteen) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-ph","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}