Sarah Paine

They can reach the United States, so we had better know what's going on.

Well...

I'm personally sick of writing about World War II.

I've done enough of it.

And so I'm personally not going in that direction.

Yeah, it's endless.

I think for a lot of the books of these narrative feel-good histories, like I'll tell you about some regiment and all the heroic stuff they did, and it's nice light airplane read, and a lot of people like that stuff.

I personally like things where I learn things that are conceptual that I can then apply to other problems, which those books wouldn't help me, but that's just me.

Well, it's hard.

What I would say is give it a book, the 30 second test.

And what's that?

If the book's about another part of the world, flip to the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon and zing through there for about 30 seconds and see, is there anything in the language of the country in question in the bibliography?

Like how much?

And if there is zip, I would toss it.

I'm curious, how many of you would be interested in reading a book that says it knows everything about the United States and there's not a single English source cited?

I think you'd regard the book as garbage.

And that Americans do this routinely, and it's a problem with political science degrees, where it would be very easy to require anyone who's going to do a specialty in comparative politics or IR, international relations, that, hey, you need to pass a language test and don't try Spanish if you think you're going to talk about the Middle East.

If it's going to be Middle East, it better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, Hebrew, and better yet, if you're really going to be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all four.

Right?

I mean, that would be true expertise.