A few tidbits from Tom-on-Amazon

Because why should e-consumers have all the fun?

Tom's Favorite books (with links over there to the Amazon pages for these books, if you're interested in buying them)

• Best book on globalization: Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works
• Best book on terror networks: Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks
• Best book on Fourth Generation Warfare: Thomas Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
• Best book on ideology: Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
• Best book on economic development: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
• Best book on the environment: Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
• Best book on the future: Bjorn Lomborg, editor, Global Crises, Global Solutions

Tom's interests (as posted over there):

Big reader of newspapers and magazines of all sorts, but favorites are New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Washington Post, The Economist and Variety.

Listening? Favorites from youth are Talking Heads, Psychedelic Furs, B-52s and Kraftwerk. Currents are Coldplay, Beck, Radiohead and U2 (actually, they hail from my youth too!).

"Watch" includes Family Guy, Simpsons, Sopranos and Sleeper Cell, plus I'm a big movie watcher, with favorite directors Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, Steven Soderberg, Hiyao Miyazaki, Quentin Tarantino and the guy who did "Love Actually."

Hobbies now are all defined by kids, so it's anime, comics, videogames, golf, running, and playgrounds in general. Oh, and anything having to do with Sponge Bob Square Pants (I'm a huge fan of Plankton and his plans to "rule the world").

Comments

[zac]

Hi Tom,
I think you sell yourself short on picking the best book on Globalization. Martin Wolf speaks mostly about economic effects, in other words, his framework is people oriented, financial oriented, and policy oriented. Your Pentagon's New Map is the better choice for the Globalization category because it has all four flows, not just People and Money, and you can't have a complete understanding of the complexities that exist if you don't have Energy and Security in the mix. The Economists need to realize that the "best" book on Globalization could only really be written by an Economic mind with Military perspective; that's what we all realized after reading PNM.

[Barbara Spalding]

Thanks for the book list. I value your opinions highly and will read every single one of them. I asked you this previously, but I want to buy a large size map of the Core and Gap World. Will you ever sell them?

You are the best. I have a fantasy that you and Peggy Noonan write a book about Catholicism and Faith. I have another one that you, Peggy Noonan and Thomas Friedman write a book about Faith or motivation or politics or business or philosophy or all of the above or something else.

I share your two books as much as I can.

Thanks for what you do.

Barbara Spalding

[John Novak]

Tom,

I appreciate the top ten list. When trying to educate myself in a subject, I always like to know what books people in the field turn to, themselves, even if I disagree with them. (And I tend to agree with you more than most.)

Some of those books were already on my tentative list.

One question: Have you read, and if so, what did you think of, Bobbitt's _The Shield of Achilles_?