Thomas E. Ricks

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
---George Orwell

This was an almost perfect read for me. It is concise and insightful and well written. It loses half a star because Ricks at times overstated his case. I loved the format which alternated chapters between these two very different men who have both left behind a legacy that is especially relevant in today's political climate. Ricks starts with a brief history of each man and show more then follows them into and through WWII. What is especially interesting is that Orwell kept a diary throughout his life, and so he commented on Churchill often. In fact:

"The last article George Orwell would ever complete and publish was a review of the second volume of Churchill's war memoirs, Their Finest Hour. He was appreciative of the politician, despite the vast difference in their political views:

"The political reminiscences which he has published from time to time have always been a great deal above average, in frankness as well as in literary quality. Churchill is among other things a journalist, with a real if not very discriminating feeling for literature, and he also has a restless, enquiring mind, interested in both concrete facts and in the analysis of motives, sometimes including his own motives. In general, Churchill's writings are more like those of a human being than of a public figure."

My favorite parts of the book were those that focused on Orwell, but then I have a thing for Orwell, and I have read a lot of his writing. Ricks does an excellent job of showing how Orwell'w writing grew with his life's experiences, and how Spain was a turning point for him:

"What he saw in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 would inform all his subsequent work. There is a direct line from the streets of Barcelona in 1937 to the torture chambers of 1984....Orwell, arriving home, had become the writer we know today from Animal Farm and 1984. Burma had made him an anti-imperialist, but it was his time in Spain that developed his political vision and with it the determination to criticize right and left with equal vigor. Before Spain, he had been a fairly conventional leftist, arguing that fascism and capitalism were essentially the same. Until this point, Orwell still clung to some of the views of the 1930s left. He would leave Spain resolved to oppose the abuse of power at both ends of the political spectrum."

The book is a mere 339 pages (with the last 60 of these being the notes and acknowledgements), but it packs a punch. Well worth your time if you are at all interested in the subject. Ricks has put together a unique and very interesting narrative that will pull you right into its pages. show less

Thomas E. Ricks's MAKING THE CORPS has sat in my bookcase for more than three years but I finally got around to reading it, and now I wonder what took me so long. Because this snail's eye view of a Marine platoon going through boot camp on Parris Island in the mid-1990s is a starkly revealing and absolutely absorbing read from cover to cover, as it follows these young men from being confused and aimless civilians to confident and proud Marines.

Ricks's look at the process is a balanced and show more fair one. He doesn't ignore the fact that many of the initial group will not make it through, and he makes the reader privy to the reasons for falling by the wayside and washing out. I was particularly surprised to learn that the DI's of Parris Island are now prohibited from using profanity or intimidating the recruits entrusted to them. Nevertheless, the DI's have their ways of getting the complete and undivided attention of their charges and, in the end, gaining their respect. More than once, however, I flashed back to my own Army BCT days, more than thirty years before Marine Platoon 3086, and how all my waking hours were lived in a near-constant state of mortal terror of my Drill Sergeants, who had no such prohibitions, so I learned a whole new vocabulary during those eight intimidating and terror-filled weeks. I also thought of an obscure and now nearly forgotten film I saw back in the seventies called BABY BLUE MARINE (starring Jan-Michael Vincent), about a recruit who washed out of a particularly brutal boot camp, in the days before it became a bit 'gentler,' and more 'civilized.'

My own BCT, back in 1962, was a lot more like the Marine boot camp documented here in MAKING THE CORPS, but with lots of profanity, intimidation and beau coups terror.

But perhaps what is most impressive in the Marine Corps Ricks shows us here is the way the Corps is actually a 'family,' and how boot camp instills 'family values' that many recruits had never learned. Wastrels and purposeless 'corner boys drinking their forties' are remade into upstanding young men who learn to respect themselves. In fact, when they return home on their first post-training leave, they find they have little in common with their old companions.

What is most disturbing in Ricks's account of the Marine culture and brotherhood is how Marines - and our professional, all-volunteer military in general - have become alienated from the civilian populace it is tasked with defending, particularly with the political and elite. He wonders how long this can go on, and even poses a remote possibility of an eventual military coup, and he makes a valid argument. This book was originally published in 1997, and I read the ten-year anniversary edition, and this separation of the military and civilian has only become more exacerbated in the intervening eighteen years.

This is simply a damn good book - well-written, thought provoking and fascinating. Made me appreciate the Marines a hell of a lot more. If you want to know more about our all-volunteer military, especially the 'few and the proud,' read this book. Highly recommended. show less

If it weren't for the Prologue and Afterword of this book, I'd have given it 4 stars. Unfortunately, Ricks must pollute what is otherwise a well written, well formatted book with his hate for Donald Trump. Had he at least pointed his fingers at other previous presidents for their faults (Clinton's dishonesty; Obama using the power of the presidency to go after political enemies) it would have been more objective. But no, things only started going wrong in 2016 and only Trump does bad things. show more For the record, I can't stand Trump as a person. But I supported virtually all of his policies.

I really like how "First Principles" was formatted. Overall, it covers how our first four presidents used classical education in their thoughts, actions, and policies. The first section focuses on their education (or, in Washington's case, lack thereof). Other than GW, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were educated at what we'd now called Ivy League schools and were taught to read Latin and Greek. They also studied those ancient civilizations and its attempts at republics and democracies. Other sections cover how those ideals were implemented during the Revolution; the Constitutional Convention; each of their presidencies; etc.

I've spent years reading about our founding and always seeing references to Plutarch, Cicero, etc. but not really understanding what they believed or how those beliefs influenced the founding generation. This book certainly helped me in this regard. I was quite familiar with most of the events in the book, but Ricks did a good job showing it in a new light from the perspective of the ancients.

If you can ignore the blatant bias, which again really only shows up at the beginning and end, you'll enjoy the book. show less

I'm a Tom Ricks fan -- I very much enjoyed Making the Corps, The Generals and First Principles. He's said on Twitter that he considers this book, Waging a Good War, to be his best. I'm not sure -- I loved Making the Corps -- but Waging a Good War is excellent.

It's an excellent history of a decade and a half of the Civil Rights Movement, but from a fresh and compelling perspective. Ricks is a military correspondent, and he examines the Movement in the light of a series of military-style show more campaigns. He argues that Movement leadership used a variety of tried and tested techniques also used by militaries preparing campaigns: rigorous training, careful strategic planning, assigning tactical initiative to leaders in the field and on the ground, post-conflict reconciliation and more.

It's a persuasive presentation. It's certainly helped me to understand the Movement in a new way.

He covers desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. Rosa Parks, the bus boycotts, the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer and much more are all here. He writes about Selma and the march across the Edmund Pettis bridge. Montgomery, Nashville, Oxford, and Memphis, including Martin Luther King's assassination, all get the attention they deserve.

He writes about other leaders of the SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, CORE and the Black Panther Party as well. The interplay and interactions of those leaders when their organizations collaborated and competed are interesting.

This would have been a first-rate history of the Movement, just on the detail with which Ricks reports the facts. His analysis of the Movement in terms of military discipline is, as far as I know, brand new. This is a piece of scholarship that advances our understanding of that time, and that effort -- still ongoing!

I loved it. show less