BREEZY AND BRIGHT
The author is intelligent and well-read. The book is a tour of most of the trouble spots of the world. The author has interesting, informative, and sometimes counter-intuitive things to say about each and every one of them. For this reason I would recommend it as a must-read for the beach or for the person who knows a little bit about foreign policy and want to know a little bit more. The BIG IDEA of the book -- i.e., the J-Curve -- is not really a theory or an idea or much of anything other than a way to organize a lot of information. But there is a lot of information, and the J-Curve graph helps organize it, albeit imprecisely. So I give it a pass on that score.
