Heyday: The 1850s And The Dawn Of The Global Age

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Ben Wilson's Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age.

Two long afternoon immersions in Ben Wilson’s book left me feeling as if I had been on a high-speed roller coaster, rocketing from the gold fields of Australia and California to the financial houses of London, battlefields in Central America and the steppes of the Caucasus and telegraph offices sprinkled over the continent.

The young historian (born in 1980) touches these locales, and many more, in depicting the 1850s as a significant decade in world history. And he skillfully melds seeming disparate happenings — a global jigsaw, if you will — into a narrative that is both convincing and entertainingly readable.

The driving force was interconnectivity of communications and travel — the transoceanic telegraph, railroads, express mail streamers and clippers, even news agencies. The undersea telegraph was made possible by development of gutta-percha, a hard and flexible latex to coat cables, insulating them from salt water. Once the telegraph came into use, Mr. Wilson notes, “events in one place reverberated around the planet with unprecedented celerity.”

The 1850s saw mass population shifts, with millions of persons finding new lives elsewhere; the overall global economy expanded an estimated five-fold.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/24/book-review-heydey-the-1850s-and-the-dawn-of-the-g/

JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA And The Sino-Indian War

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Bruce Riedel's JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA and the Sino-Indian War.  

In October 1962, the CIA’s discovery that the Soviet Union was shipping missiles to Cuba electrified world fears of nuclear warfare. Tedious negotiations by President John F. Kennedy, in which he agreed to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey, ended the frightening crisis.

Virtually unnoticed by the public at large was a parallel crisis — a border conflict between India and China that threatened to escalate into full-scale warfare between the Asian giants. India was the aggressor, dispatching troops to try to settle a long-standing boundary dispute.

Things went poorly for the Indians. An alarmed Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sent an urgent letter to Kennedy asking for 12 squadrons of supersonic fighter planes, with ground radar equipment, to fight off Chinese aviators.

... That the India-China conflict was halfway around the world meant the crisis lacked the geographic immediacy of Cuba. Another factor that shielded it from wide public view was that no one outside of official Washington knew of a top-secret CIA operation in Tibet, begun under President Eisenhower, that played a minor role in touching off the confrontation.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/17/book-review-jfks-forgotten-crisis/