Profiles in Folly by Alan Axelrod

What a history book!  Lets just get to it - what is the worst and dumbest decisions ever made, US, World,not the universe - yet.  Axelrod not only writes a book that is easy to read, it is a book that is hard to put down.  My God, what other dumb decision is there?  From Custer to Katrina, from Rasputin to George W Bush we are treated to thoughtful essays that provide us with a great opportunity to see when leadership failed us.

Enron to Edsel the book jumps from politics to economy.  The book looks at some of the worst presidents to some of the best, but it spares no rod when it sees the Gulf of Tonkin and the Dred Scott decisions.

This book is real and thought provoking history.  From "I am not a crook" to the racist refusal to use the African American Troops at Petersburg we are reminded that we do not live with the best decisions, we survive the worst.

The Old Ways

As a walking person I was drawn to Macfarlane's book, but I did not really understand that it was a walking tribute to Edward Thomas who was the writer that influenced Robert Frost and was the basis for the Two Paths Diverge verses.  

It is a book that is rich in references to paths, writing, walking, philosophy.  

These are the folk paths, the journeys by foot that have marked the earth for centuries and the landscape that is encountered when they are walked now.  

Some parts of the book drag and others are too short.  Depending upon your reference, each chapter has a different perspective and collectively they honor the basic experience of walking.. 

 It started out slowly and suddenly it was over.  How did that happen.  Maybe, like a walk, it takes time to get your stride, to feel the landscape and find the stories that are all around. 

A Spy Among Friends

I grew up on I Led Three Lives - a television series based on Herbert Philbrick. It was a series that my vague memory puts as a classic. In Wikipedia it describes the series: "It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s." In this book we go back to that era and find the most notorious of all spies - Kim Philby double agent who single-handedly turned the western spy agents into a joke. A Russian agent, Philby almost became the head of British spies. 

Here is the ultimate of spying, almost a parody of the parody I SPY in Mad magazine. So sophisticated were our spies that we could not figure out when someone in our own agency was causing the people we supported to be caught, captured, and killed by the Soviets.

It has to be an embarrassment to the families of the leading spies in the US and Britain and it is a good lesson for everyone in this clandestine game.

It is a fascinating story and well written.