Amir D. Aczel: Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider

Recently, NPR did a story on the interesting book and author, Present at the Creation. On the radio program, Talk of the Nation, the author was a guest, and this was recently posted on the accompanying webpage for that episode/show: In his new book, Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel tells the story of the European Organization for Nuclear Research's Large Hadron Collider. With the multibillion-euro collider, researchers hope to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. The podcast of that show is embedded down below.

David J. Lynch: When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out: The World's Most Resilient Country and Its Struggle to Rise Again

In December of 2010, the author said in an interview with Current Intelligence:

Well, these are really tragic days for Ireland. After overcoming its long history of poverty to become a high-growth economy known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland now has stumbled into a financial debacle that will take it years to escape. The villains were reckless banks that binged on cheap capital to fuel a housing and credit bubble that was larger even that what we had here in the United States, facilitated by blind or cowed regulators and politicians who were happy to pretend that the good times could last forever. Some tried to warn them they were wrong, but while the boom lasted the Cassandras were ignored. Now, the Irish people – both the guilty and innocent – face years of unavoidable sacrifice and hardship. It’s going to be a long time before anyone again looks to Ireland as an economic model, as small countries from Colombia to Croatia did during the Celtic Tiger years. But if the Irish carry out some long overdue reforms, they can look forward to a decent future once the crisis passes. I’ve had the chance to report from other countries in the midst of just terrible economic suffering – Indonesia and Russia in 1998, Turkey in 2001 – and in the dark times it’s always impossible to imagine there will be brighter days ahead. But there were for those people and there will be for the Irish.

See the transcript to that interview here. The Economist (periodical) said this about the book and author, in November, 2010:

It is true, though, that Ireland’s political class has been tried and found wanting, a theme pursued also in David Lynch’s book, “When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out”. He begins, appositely enough, with a gathering of property developers and their political cronies in the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway races. Much of the rest of his tale concerns Sean Fitzpatrick’s disastrous mortgage bank, Anglo Irish. It was the troubles of Anglo Irish that led to the extraordinary decision by Brian Cowen, the Fianna Fail prime minister, taken in the small hours of September 30th 2008, to guarantee all bank deposits in Ireland—and hence to incur a bill that has now reached almost a third of GDP.

See that Economist piece here.

Ireland's Debt and Housing Binge far Worse Than America's en Yahoo! Video

Author Wheatcroft on Book `Enemy at the Gate': Lewis Lapham from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

Check the Bloomberg podcast of the interview with the author, here. Also, The Telegraph recently reviewed the book; the review itself is excellent, and serves as a great primer for those that are studying the topic (say in high school or college, for some project). In the article, Noel Malcom writes:

[...] Andrew Wheatcroft shows, an Ottoman army moving forward on campaign had two major advantages: the Ottomans' logistics were much better than those of the West European armies, and they also derived great benefit from their use of Tatar auxiliaries - large numbers of highly mobile light cavalry, ideally adapted for raiding, foraging and reconnaissance. Once they had arrived at the theatre of war, however, there were two quite different forms of fighting to be undertaken. Siege warfare played to their strengths: efficient logistics on a huge scale, disciplined (and relatively hygienic) camps, and highly skilled miners and engineers. A stronghold well stocked with food, water and ammunition (as Vienna was) could hold out for a long time, but tunnels could reach under even the mightiest bastions, and gunpowder would then bring them down.

See that review, here. See also: Victory at Vienna: The Ottoman siege of 1683 : a historical essay and a selective list of reading materials, The Islamic World in Ascendancy: From the Arab Conquests to the Siege of Vienna, Historic Print (L): [Siege and relief of Vienna in 1683, with portraits of Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg, Em, The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

"Richard Holbrooke: Kennedy Democrat The savior of Sarajevo believed that American power should be used for good." from the Wall Street Journal by FOUAD AJAMI

Richard Holbrooke, who died this week at age 69, loved epigraphs. They are strewn all over his writings—poems and passages from Euripides, W.H. Auden, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, the diplomatist and historian Harold Nicolson. An epigraph from Herman Melville turns up early in Holbrooke's remarkable chronicle of his experience in the Balkans, "To End a War" (1998). "With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." Holbrooke lived the life of his choice, driven by that itch. The Holbrooke story could have ended in the Mekong Delta, where as a young man he served as "pacification adviser." He could have perished, as three of his colleagues traveling with him did, in the summer of 1995, on the treacherous Mount Igman road to Sarajevo. Mr. Ajami is a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

See that article here. The other day, the Dutch newspaper, DeVerdieping Trouw wrote this [a translation from its original dutch:

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993 he returned to government and government, first as ambassador to Germany and then in Washington as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. In 1996, Holbrooke at his own request relieved from that post because he wanted to spend more time on his marriage to writer Kati Marton, his third wife. He married her in 1995, the year of 'Dayton'. About his role as architect of the peace treaty he wrote the book "To End a War." In the aftermath claimed the former political leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, the ICTY last year that Holbrooke him in exchange for his departure from politics was promised immunity from prosecution. The diplomat denied that strongly.

See that Dutch article, here. See also: No Man's Land, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia