TWIB II-19
Feb. 11th, 2008 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanAnd I'm back on schedule!
1) America's Strategy In Southeast Asia - James A. Tyner
Tyner's America’s Strategy In Southeast Asia is a layman's history of the region's conceptual creation in the minds of U.S. policymakers, and the various strategies with which they have engaged it. He argues, and offers compelling evidence, that the United States has viewed Southeast Asia primarily as a surrogate space in which to advance its goals in other areas of the world, and that its main motivation is to create and maintain economic markets biased toward American goods and services. Tyner does a good job of creating a single, unified narrative out of events that other authors consign to eras: the Depression era, the World War II era, the Vietnam War era, the War on Terror era. He also avoids falling into the trap of useless Marxian interpretations or slavish adherence to realist doctrine, allowing Strategy's content to transcend any strictly theoretical perspective. It is precisely because he declines to rub the reader's nose in the calculating cynicism of American strategy in the region that readers become aware of just how callous such strategy is.
Unfortunately, all this is marred--almost irretrievably--by Tyner's inexcusable sloppiness as an author. He frequently uses words without understanding their meanings (e.g. “indict” does not mean “to propose" and if his students frequently offer up “recantations” of his lectures in their course papers, he needs to seriously reevaluate his teaching abilities). Tyner also places too much trust in his spell-checker ( “...[import quotas] placed under absolution limitations"; “To understand [his] lack of interest of East Timor..."), resulting in errors that disrupt the flow of his narrative while readers try to figure out what on earth he actually intended to say. He switches verb tense within single sentences. He misuses articles and prepositions, flubs the distinction between it's/its and the possessive plural and possessive singular apostrophes. Subject-verb disagreements abound, as do redundancies (“The government began preparing preparations to attack..."; "Its leadership and support drawn from Catholics, small farmers, and officials from others who had benefited..."). Country names are misspelled, and the index is next to useless (it contains an entry for the Strait of Gibraltar, but nothing for the Strait of Malacca--which is of much greater regional importance and appears many times within the text). Indeed, I counted an average of one error per three pages. This level of inattention would be bad enough in a graduate term paper; it is nothing less than an insult in a $33.00 professionally-published book written by a university educator and Ph.D-holder. The excellent content recommends this book to anyone interested in the region; make every effort, however, to obtain it from a library in order not to monetarily reward the author for his editorial laziness.
SBS: Thirty-three books. Let's see how many I can finish by next week.
That will be all.
1) America's Strategy In Southeast Asia - James A. Tyner
Tyner's America’s Strategy In Southeast Asia is a layman's history of the region's conceptual creation in the minds of U.S. policymakers, and the various strategies with which they have engaged it. He argues, and offers compelling evidence, that the United States has viewed Southeast Asia primarily as a surrogate space in which to advance its goals in other areas of the world, and that its main motivation is to create and maintain economic markets biased toward American goods and services. Tyner does a good job of creating a single, unified narrative out of events that other authors consign to eras: the Depression era, the World War II era, the Vietnam War era, the War on Terror era. He also avoids falling into the trap of useless Marxian interpretations or slavish adherence to realist doctrine, allowing Strategy's content to transcend any strictly theoretical perspective. It is precisely because he declines to rub the reader's nose in the calculating cynicism of American strategy in the region that readers become aware of just how callous such strategy is.
Unfortunately, all this is marred--almost irretrievably--by Tyner's inexcusable sloppiness as an author. He frequently uses words without understanding their meanings (e.g. “indict” does not mean “to propose" and if his students frequently offer up “recantations” of his lectures in their course papers, he needs to seriously reevaluate his teaching abilities). Tyner also places too much trust in his spell-checker ( “...[import quotas] placed under absolution limitations"; “To understand [his] lack of interest of East Timor..."), resulting in errors that disrupt the flow of his narrative while readers try to figure out what on earth he actually intended to say. He switches verb tense within single sentences. He misuses articles and prepositions, flubs the distinction between it's/its and the possessive plural and possessive singular apostrophes. Subject-verb disagreements abound, as do redundancies (“The government began preparing preparations to attack..."; "Its leadership and support drawn from Catholics, small farmers, and officials from others who had benefited..."). Country names are misspelled, and the index is next to useless (it contains an entry for the Strait of Gibraltar, but nothing for the Strait of Malacca--which is of much greater regional importance and appears many times within the text). Indeed, I counted an average of one error per three pages. This level of inattention would be bad enough in a graduate term paper; it is nothing less than an insult in a $33.00 professionally-published book written by a university educator and Ph.D-holder. The excellent content recommends this book to anyone interested in the region; make every effort, however, to obtain it from a library in order not to monetarily reward the author for his editorial laziness.
SBS: Thirty-three books. Let's see how many I can finish by next week.
That will be all.