Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The companion to the Showtime documentary series, director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of traditional history books in this thoroughly researched and rigorously analyzed look at the dark side of American history.
Most are loathe to admit that the United States has any imperial pretensions. But history tells a different story as filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick reveal in this riveting account of the rise and decline of the American empire. Stone and Kuznick will introduce readers to a pantheon of heroes and villains as they show not only how far the United States has drifted from its democratic traditions, but the powerful forces that have struggled to get us back on track.
The authors reveal that: American leaders often believe they are unbound by history, yet Stone and Kuznick argue that we must face our troubling history honestly and forthrightly in order to set a new course for the twenty-first century. Their conclusions will challenge even experts, but there is one question only readers can answer: Is it too late for America to change? To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Jeff The time frame is different than the Zinn book.
I also feel that much of this book isn't as radical of an interpretation as Zinn's work. I am only a …more The time frame is different than the Zinn book. Lists with This Book.
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I couldn't forget when the author said: Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do. Feb 19, JBradford rated it it was amazing. I am very sure that I would normally take a very dim view of anyone who would review a book without having read it — I belong to an online recipe group, for example, and I am routinely incensed by people who will give a rating to a meal and say they are going to try it, which means they have not tried it yet and therefore have no idea what it actually tastes like. In this case, however, I have some idea, because I have had a taste. This is a page book including the bibliography and index t I am very sure that I would normally take a very dim view of anyone who would review a book without having read it — I belong to an online recipe group, for example, and I am routinely incensed by people who will give a rating to a meal and say they are going to try it, which means they have not tried it yet and therefore have no idea what it actually tastes like.
I managed to renew it for another week, but I was very much involved with a few other books at that time as well as with various and sundry other pursuits of my life, and it turned out I did not get around to actually looking at the book until I got the second request to bring it back, this time with no chance for renewal.
I read the first chapter, and found myself absolutely intrigued. I then read through the last chapter, and found myself intrigued again. The first chapter effectively commits Republicans to perdition, and the last chapter does pretty much the same thing for Democrats — and somewhere in between, I gather, the authors want to tell us how we really screwed up by not electing Henry Wallace as president; since I feel very much the same way about Hubert Horatio Humphrey, I felt this was my kind of book.
It is important to note, therefore, that some books that get a five-star rating are not necessarily entertaining or enjoyable, but they are always informative. Needless to say, I am not inclined to give five-star ratings to works of fiction, but I have found that I had to do so several times. That is certainly true of this book. I certainly am not going to suggest in any way that I agree with everything that the authors say, and I am almost sure that during the course of reading the book I will come to the conclusion in some places that they have twisted the meaning of what people said or did, stretching it into meaning something other than reality.
Despite that fact, I am already aware that the major push of the book is to tell us things we did not know about the political goings-on of our past and present, with these claims being backed up by validated statements and writings of the people involved. I am well aware of how dangerous this can be; I have seen too many examples of how such things can be twisted by opposing politicians in such cases as Supreme Court nominees. I cannot discard it that simply, however.
As a matter of fact, my reaction when I received the second letter from the library was to take the book back to them posthaste … and then to go online and purchase my own copy, which is even now in the mail.
The Untold History of The United States by Oliver Stone
I justify that because this is not a book for weekend reading; it is a book I will want on my library shelf so that I can return to it again and again for reference. I presume that after I received the book, I will eventually get around to reading it I have no intention of taking it with me on my upcoming vacation cruise , and that I will at that time come back and make a more complete report. Meanwhile, you are to go get your own copy! View all 3 comments. May 12, Alastair Rosie rated it it was amazing Shelves: I remember his rants against Russia and China, and had I not been a voracious reader, I may have followed his political leanings.
I too came to admire America but it was not the USA that my father adored. I came to view people like Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, and Oliver Stone as true patriots; my father saw them as traitors. It leaves us with the questionable legacy of the Obama administration and the inevitable conclusion that all is not well with this house of cards. I would take issue with those who think it idolises the Democrat party. On the contrary it does reveal the shortcomings of the Democrat administrations.
Each administration is held up to the light of day and each one fails to come up to the standard. It feels very much as if the authors have opened the windows and doors to a dark house of horrors, and maybe even knocked down a couple of walls to reveal the double dealing and corruption at the heart of the American Dream. Its love affair with big business and the unholy marriage between the corporate elite and Congress is laid out warts and all for the reader.
At least thirty percent of my Kindle version is dedicated to an extensive bibliography, which invites you to explore different periods at your leisure and with over a century of American dominance the subject matter would probably fill a couple of libraries. It strikes me as I read it that this book should be read by foreign policy experts, particularly those in the White House.
As any student of history will tell you, an empire either collapses under its own weight or is subsumed by another empire. I think the utility of this book lies in what it is not. It's not all-encompassing, but a history of the 20th Century. I don't know if it is more comprehensive than its companion TV series, because I don't have cable and probably won't see it.
I can say that it does hold a satisfactory argument that US foreign policy in ther 20th Century would be better served by Realism than by Wilsonian liberalism. I think there ar I think the utility of this book lies in what it is not. I think there are also some good observations here that need to be communicated. The US needs a free, unbiased press, and if we ever had one we have some hard work ahead if we want to return to it. I also share the opinion that there were plenty of nefarious characters in the 20th Century who manipulated the country into war by bringing up the words "Munich" and especially "Appeasement," which is a bit like hitting the Easy Button for mobilizing people who learn everything from the TV.
I think the book succinctly tackled Nixon's career and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and if you don't want to invest the time in Rick Perlstein's and Bob Woodward's books respectively on these topics, "The Untold History of the United States" will fill the bill. The book has some perspecives, though, that I just cannot embrace.
First of all, the argument that the world would have been a much better place if FDR had picked Henry Wallace instead of Truman for his Vice President. In fact, had that happened, there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War. Stone and Kuzick can rationalize this with their gentle treatment of Joseph Stalin; yes, the Soviets lost more territory and people in WWII than any other combatant, but Stalin and the people around him were some VERY nasty characters and President Truman scared the crap out of the battle-hardened Soviet Politburo--period.
The Iron Curtain ended up where it did because Western leaders stopped it from moving further, and the Germans and Japanese preferred this for some pretty compelling reasons. I also think repeated implications that Truman was a bigot are a little disingenuous in light of his support for integrating the military and establishing the state of Israel.
I'm also not real comfortable with the book's criticisms of Secretaries Clinton and Gates, nor do I view Private Bradley Manning, who broke his oath to protect US state secrets, as someone worthy of my sympathy. I don't particularly favor Boot's perspectives, either, but I do think that somewhere between Stone's characterization of the US as imperial exploitation engine and Boot's Neocon musings on America's foreign policy lies the truth.
First they stole the words, then they stole the meanings. Dec 18, Frederick Gault rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is a worthwhile read. That being said, it was one of the most distressing and depressing books I've every read! We live in the Matrix. Most think America is a bastion of freedom and democracy. This is not at all the case. It is a story we tell ourselves.
The facts show something very different. I wanted to stab my self repeatedly in the eyes with a rusty screwdriver! My rage was towering.
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Spinal fluid leaked from my ears as I sputtered in impotent anger. Nixon was worse than I thought! How i This is a worthwhile read. How is that even possible? This nation is ruled by greedy violent psychopaths. What's worse is they are not very bright. The violent blundering carnage over the last years - and right up to today - is breathtaking.
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The only thing the plutocrat kakistocracy does competently is steal money and bamboozle the credulous with bread and circuses. I include Obama in this pack of bumblers. The current president has empowered the Military Industrial Complex and spy agencies in way that Dick Cheney could only dream of. Lest you think I exaggerate; I counted three instances where in my lifetime we were seconds away from a full on nuclear launch!
When we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan they were desperately trying to surrender! Our government has routinely tortured people over the last century. The fight against Communism was a cure far worse than the disease, in lost lives, and lost freedoms. We've had rogue administrations that sold weapons and drugs to Iran to prop up fascist bastards in Central America. This depressing list of facts goes on and on. Everyone should know these things and almost nobody does. Perhaps the grim meat-hook reality is such a downer that most people would rather not know.
View all 13 comments. Dec 14, Donald added it. This was an incredible book! The book moves chronologically from World War 1 to the Obama administration. The emphasis is usually on how each Administration reacted to the American Empire, which was initiated in Much of the material centers on the US-Soviet relationship and how there were numerous occasions that that relationship could have been vastly im This was an incredible book! Much of the material centers on the US-Soviet relationship and how there were numerous occasions that that relationship could have been vastly improved and the Cold War avoided, along with the nuclear nightmare which still haunts us.
Through a lot of skullduggery, Harry Truman was chosen, a choice that, the book shows, poisoned the rest of the century for the US. Truman was much like GW Bush, an arrogant, self-important cretin who couldn't "walk and chew gum at the same time.
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Wallace, on the other hand, was a visionary whose writings can be read today with the same power as when they were originally written. Wallace was a thinker and a problem solver, not the sort of ideologues that have so utterly destroyed the United States. Truman, like his successors, completely failed to understand the Soviet's concerns during and after WWW2. The same ignorance is being repeated in the 'War on Terrorism. I very Highly recommend this book.
Would that it be mandatory reading in High School and a prerequisite before stepping into the Voting Booth. Jan 20, Jackie Glenn rated it it was amazing. I found this book enthralling. It provides an entirely different outlook on the past presidents and their times. It also left me extremely angry that most of the presidents and the people under them caused so much havoc in the world and at such terrible cost that could have been put to constructive use elsewhere - even to alleviate poverty in the United States.
I think all Americans should read this book. Dec 15, Paddythemic rated it it was amazing. View all 5 comments. Sep 23, Tim Pendry rated it really liked it Shelves: A health warning is due on this book. It is a polemic linked to a documentary. Usually that should be cause enough for caution but it is generally well written and researched, valuable as a corrective to the standard internal narrative about US foreign policy which is somewhat Pollyanna-ish. Stone's propensity for conspiracy theory and a curious hagiography surrounding the John F.
Kennedy who might have been reflected briefly in this book is corrected by a solid research team clearly under the A health warning is due on this book. Kennedy who might have been reflected briefly in this book is corrected by a solid research team clearly under the able direction of Peter Kuznick and, no doubt, guided by Stone himself.
The result has flaws - too kind to the Russians while the balance shifts into contemporary polemic in the final chapters on Bush and Obama. We have mentioned the over favourable approach to JFK. But these flaws, denying it five stars, do not detract from the achievement. This is a book that I would like to see in every American high school library, not as the main set text but simply as an intelligent corrective to the conformist almost totalitarian educational training of Americans in the myth of their own cultural and political beneficence.
Empire of Liberty - https: This is why Stone and Kuznick have done their fellow citizens a service in the age of Sanders, Clinton and Trump. They have held up a mirror to American foreign and international economic policy and shown us an imperial system out of educated democratic control run by psychopaths. It is rare that I feel much emotion in reading a book nowadays but I found myself seething with anger at times - on the decision-making around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the murderous assault on Gautemalan freedom and, of course, the lunacy of Vietnam and MAD.
I used the term psychopath. It is a term I usually avoid using because it over-simplifies the brutal things some people have to do in existential situations and is too easily applied to people stuck in a system like bankers or brokers but here the term often applies. Some of the activities of the American State, often deliberately obfuscating its actions before the democratic process, often manipulating and subverting it and often backed by legislators whose ignorance can only be put down to the force of ideology, are, frankly and simply, evil.
This is not to say that most American public servants are evil but then I suspect most ordinary Communist apparatchiki or Nazi civil servants were not intrinsically evil but all served systems that accepted evil acts against civilians and lies to their own people as normal and right. You will have to make up your own mind after reading this catalogue of horrors and lies but, before getting over excited, you should balance the book with some reading of other texts with a more sanguine view of American exceptionalism and belief in its being a 'beacon on the hill'.
The honest truth is that this book falls precisely into the American trap of seeing everything as black and white rather than many shades of grey. It is the dark to the sunny light of the standard American narrative but that does not make it right. One yearns for a balanced view. Yet facts are still facts. It is hard to reason away many American State actions which were the more criminal in being based on bad intelligence, poor judgement and the taking of risks that might have led to the immolation of our species let alone tens of thousands of passing peasants.
OK, so the US won and the spectre of communism has now degenerated into a few elderly socialists who can't muster majorities anywhere but the price, as I read it, was too high. It degraded America itself decade on decade until degeneracy became the national norm. Forgetting the overblown tirade against Obama here although it is true that he is now mere creature of a system created by his predecessors , each President, perhaps excluding FDR and Clinton I, is held up to scrutiny and found wanting. Bush II was far from uniquely dodgy.
Indeed, one of the benefits of this book is that it cuts through the partisan nonsense and shows us that Democrats and Republicans are really not much better than each other when push comes to shove - though the silence here suggests Clinton I was perhaps a bright point through inaction. If this is an argument for Clinton II, however, I can't find it in her pronouncements or the text. For some reason, she is a 'hawk' far to the Right of Obama and not quite so different from the world of Bush II as naive Democrats would like to think.
As for Trump, words should fail but at least he has the merit of possibly, just possibly, not being answerable to an establishment machinery backing sustained state violence, one that is clearly horrified by his candidacy. If the system is horrified by him, he may have merit! The American propensity to concentrate on the individual the President misses the point that he is always embedded in a system and that this system is imperial, concerned with economic loot and highly militarised.
The noble gestures and rhetoric are just icing on a mouldy cake. The Generals answer to the Commander-in-Chief but he is trapped into compliance with the cultural expectations of competitive but closely knit networks made up of surprisingly few ideologically motivated people with an axe to grind. Stone and Kuznick bring out the continuities where a few hundred ambitious careerists, lost in abstract models of foreign policy, float like trash on a registered electorate of million souls and coldly and blithely dispose of the lives of others without any existential self-questioning.
One suspects that the system both attracts and promotes a personality type perfectly fitted to serve it as all such systems do - just as the Roman, British and Soviet Empires created their unself-reflective 'types'. There is no reason why the US should be different in this. What seems to be lacking in the contemporary historiography is an analysis of careers, patronage, ideology formation, interests and connections, such as Lewis Namier once did for the eighteenth century British Parliament - ideology is not top down but centred in group-think.
As with Namier, such a historian might find that this closed elite shared a 'weltanschauung' but pursued self interest within it - questioning nothing but seeking to combine through allegiance to networks parties that scarcely differed from each other except in their competition for benefits. Namier's analysis of a grasping and self interested elite left little room for ideas but eighteenth century Britain did not 'progress' to the American situation where ideas, linked existentially to identity, might become weapons of advantage.
Ideas have here paradoxically displaced humanity. The question is whether Americans who read the standard narrative, the non-American neutral narrative and the dissident native narrative this book would still want to change a decayed system that thinks its eighteenth century constitution is sufficient protection against evil. It was in that Arthur M. Schlesinger coined the term for the Imperial Presidency as something uncontrollable and prone to exceed constitutional limits. Yet it is that constitution that permits those excesses - taken even further by Bush II and even as the authors argue by Obama.
What either Clinton II or Trump could do with these excessive powers of which a first taste lay in that most sinister of Democratic 'progressive' Presidents Woodrow Wilson is perhaps what is keeping many centrist liberals awake at night with reason. Neither fills one with hope. The truth is that liberal Americans are still stuck in their eighteenth century and 'rights' paradigm as Roman intellectuals were once stuck in their republican and 'virtu' ideology as they lurched stage by stage towards Tiberius and Caligula. In the end, all a Roman could hope for was that the Emperor be a good one.
American liberals have found themselves in the same situation, hoping against hope that the next President will be a 'good one'. As Stone and Kuznick show, that is not a likely outcome. Even Carter gets a coruscating treatment here that does not allow his later saintly persona to get in the way of the facts. Perhaps Clinton I's scarce mention only arises because he was uninterested in foreign policy and Bush I the best since FDR had done all the work in apparently taming Russia.
So, all in all, with the caveats, an eye-opening book that might further radicalise the young but not, I hope, into a futile faith in some man in a white hat appearing in the Oval Office but into beginning to think like a European and move from individuals to a critique of the total system. Obviously many radicals who voted for Sanders were stirred but he lost! Americans might be engineered to be horrified by Aleppo perhaps because it is the Russians 'doing it' but not enormously by Falluja or Gaza.
One suspects the complaints about Vietnam owed far more to the fears of narcissistic hippies than concern for the slaughter of the Vietnamese. Sometimes the US was existentially threatened: Sometimes it acted out of for greed which at least is comprehensible. Sometimes it killed for a theory or a dream or an idea.
Frankly, that last makes it not much better than the Soviets. Feb 07, Kamil Salamah rated it it was amazing. I would start by saying it could also be titled: An Empire that sky rocketed at tremendous speed and and is facing the flicking of its sheen and glamor: It made its imperialist designs be felt going back to its annexation of the harbor of the Pacific island of Pago Pago in and built a new navy between and Fast forward to the 21st century, this Empire has over bases strung across the planet.
In , anthropologist David Vine confirmed this: America has declined because of this. America has long been highjacked by its elites and its military: This approximately equals what the rest of the world spends. It only proliferates MORE hatred, aggression, death and destruction. As an American Congressman noted," Did all this spending make Americans safer? May 18, Tadas Talaikis rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book in one sentence: The "funniest" thing is when "liberals" Hillary Clinton are back to back with war criminals, like Henry Kissinger.
This craze with "our way of life" goes too far away. As a "psychologist" I can understand that, - people, due to their croc-brains, approve authorities. The harder some alpha-crocs "hitlers" cream about some fanatic fantastic idiocy some nonsense ideology, any ideology , the more approval you get from submissive infantile or aggressive beta-crocodiles. My illusions about sanity in U. Let's see if we would not awake one day and not find theocratic dictatorship, like in The handmaid's tale , forcing to sleep with "commodores" of god for the "higher cause".
Simple - media propaganda. A lot of time was required to decrypt everything trading helped a lot, because in trading no ideology or belief would work into more realistic terms - crocodiles love power and money, that also gives some power. We're genetically programmed killer animals.
The Untold History of The United States
Everything else is just comfort fantasies. That's why I consider Hominids revolutionary, it paints a much better picture than we have today. Probably all aggressive animals should be castrated. That would make a world better place, but the means are still wrong, probably. Like Ayn Rand said, everything evil is after "higher better world cause". So, a lot had happened in my head during those days, when I read this book, would probably also watch the series, too much to be said here, so saving time I will only note.
Sex redefined by Clinton, freedom redefined by Bush and hostilities redefined by Obama. What's for people, like us? Forget democrats and republicans, liberals or conservatives, those are wrong ideologies.
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