Peter Frankopan. Silk Roads.

A positive jacket review by Niall Ferguson cautioned me that the book must be like much of his own--an undergraduate hackwork hastily scavenged from the World Wide Web and the media headlines--and my intuition proved entirely right. But as it the case with Harvard, students do not go to Oxford where Peter Frankopan is a history professor, to study anything--they go there to know the right people.

One of the hallmarks of a poorly executed or plagiarized undergraduate coursework is a display of contradictory statements lifted from disparate sources without any comment or discussion. In the case of Frankopan,  these statements literally stand next to each other. In one paragraph, he cites Secretary  Pompeo promising to starve Iranians into submission, in another--Pompeo claiming that the USA is not the enemy of Iranian people--only its elite.