America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

I love the "we read it so you don't have to" aspect of this Newsweek feature. The book being reviewed is The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era by Michael Mandelbaum.

Reading books is enjoyable, it's something I try to do even with the amount of time I spend blogging, but these reviews help me decide if it's a book that will interest me or make me say...hum...

Mandelbaum is a lucid thinker and a clear writer, but reading The Frugal Superpower feels a little too much like sitting in lecture hall. There are no characters, no colorful anecdotes to liven the analysis, and many of the assertions are short on supporting evidence, like the tossed-off claim that the United States’ post–Cold War foreign policy has been motivated largely by “philanthropist” aims