Keylor, W. R., The Twentieth-Century World: An International History, Oxford

Keylor, W. R., The Twentieth-Century World: An International History, Oxford
University Press, 2003, ISBN-10: 0195168437 (paperback, 2005)

If you are a student who needs to cram the history of international relations in the XX century in a single night before the test, this is the book you need. Judging by its 5th edition, this is the opinion of many. It is cursory, but accurate. Moreover, unlike most other English-language sources, Keylor’s treatise gives ample consideration to political events in the regions outside of the Euro-Atlantic sphere, such as East Asia or Latin America.

Priorities, though, are strange. The whole World War II and the Holocaust occupy 18 pages out of six hundred, fewer than the 90s dissolution of Yugoslavia. Maps are good, but statistical tables are sketchy, mostly geared towards American trade relations.

Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today, Gotham, ISBN-10 1592402224

Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today, Gotham, ISBN-10 1592402224

This is Ramsfeldianism writ large. Almost all correct observations are lifted from J. F. C. Fuller, a Nazi sympathizer, who was also a very intelligent and well-educated observer (why all plagiarists chose either well-known or second-rate works is a mystery to me). Sometimes, he recycles Fuller’s dotage absurdities such as his exaggerated belief in purely psychological impact of new weapons, as the reason for their adoption.
As is typical for all neocons, Boot worships Prussian military tradition. Yet, since Frederic the Great, there was only one war (Franco-Prussian, 1870-1871), in which German military machine performed creditably against an opponent of comparable technical sophistication. This is the perpetual PR of the German generals inducing them to write long, self-serving memoirs after each lost war, explaining how they had nearly won it, and the perpetual habit of British journalists and American military academy teachers to believe every word of it, which obscures their, usually dismal, record on the battlefield.
His adulation for these “goose-stepping morons” (apt description by Indiana Jones) ends only with similarly garbled paeans for the US military. Nearly all innovations in military weapons and tactics since circa the Civil War are ascribed to Americans, or at least Anglo-Saxons, as if the author was schooled in late Stalin’s Russia, where all technical or exploration achievements ought to be backdated to Russian protagonists. The purpose of this book is to justify apparently insatiable appetite of the Pentagon, after the Cold War, to procure new and expensive weapons systems without any consideration for their tactical suitability or sound technical design, on the basis of pure “gut feeling” by the military bureaucrats.