The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris - Hardcover

Beinart, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061456462 ISBN 13: 9780061456466

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2010

Synopsis

Chronicles the United States's tendency toward hubris and explains how Americans have learned from the tragedies that result from this weakness. By the author of The Good Fight. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

""The Icarus Syndrome" does what works of history and journalism do at their very best: use the past to illuminate, in often stark and surprising ways, the challenges of the present. This is an important book."--Jon Meacham, author of "American Lion"

""The Icarus Syndrome" is a confident and contentious history of more than a century of American foreign policy and its recurring tragic flaws."--Sean Wilentz, author of "The Age of Reagan"

"Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome" is very much a book with a message: a cautionary message to avoid hubris and to recognize the messy reality of world politics."--Paul Kennedy, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"

""The Icarus Syndrome" is a readable survey of 'America in the world' over the past hundred years. Nothing is more chilling than Beinart's catalog of the continuous, wrong-headed invocation of 'Munich' and 'appeasement.'"--Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "The New York Review of Books"

A highly readable and useful hundred-year account of American ventures abroad that can serve as a path to understanding the past failures and uncovering why policy renewal is now proving so elusive. . . . Beinart usefully grapples with the practical impediments to making good policy. --Leslie H. Gelb, "The New York Times Book Review""

Impressive. . . . Mr Beinart has produced an original and ambitious study. --"The Economist""

"The Icarus Syndrome" is a readable survey of America in the world over the past hundred years. Nothing is more chilling than Beinart s catalog of the continuous, wrong-headed invocation of Munich and appeasement. --Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "The New York Review of Books""

A brilliant new book about the pendulum swings of U.S. foreign policy between excessive ambition and excessive retrenchment. --"The Los Angeles Times""

With this book Beinart vindicates his standing as one of the major thinkers of his generation on the United States world role. --Walter Russell Mead, "Foreign Affairs""

Beinart possesses the analytical skills of a seasoned historian. . . . He s a smart, reasoned political analyst who doesn t resort to hyperbole and hysteria when making a point. . . The result is a book that s generally enlightening. --"The San Francisco Chronicle""

From the Back Cover:

In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks -- a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of three wars -- World War One, Vietnam, and Iraq -- three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought untold tragedy.

In dazzling color, Beinart portrays three extraordinary generations: the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher's son who became the closest thing to a political messiah the world had ever seen. The Camelot intellectuals who took America into Vietnam, led by Lyndon Johnson, who lay awake at night after night shaking with fear that his countrymen considered him weak. And George W. Bush and the post-cold war neoconservatives, the romantic bullies who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. Like Icarus, each of these generations crafted "wings" -- a theory about America's relationship to the world. They flapped carefully at first, but gradually lost their inhibitions until, giddy with success, they flew into the sun.

But every era also brought new leaders and thinkers who found wisdom in pain. They reconciled American optimism -- our belief that anything is possible -- with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will. In their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today. Based on years of research, The Icarus Syndrome is a provocative and strikingly original account of hubris in the American century -- and how we learn from the tragedies that result.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061456462
• ISBN 13: 9780061456466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496