Bruce LR Smith – författare

After World War II, American statesman and scholar Lincoln Gordon emerged as one of the key players in the reconstruction of Europe. During his long career, Gordon worked as an aide to National Security Adviser Averill Harriman in President Truman's administration; for President John F. Kennedy as an author of the Alliance for Progress and as an adviser on Latin American policy; and for President Lyndon B. Johnson as assistant secretary of state. Gordon also served as the United States ambassador to Brazil under both Kennedy and Johnson. Outside the political sphere, he devoted his considerable talents to academia as a professor at Harvard University, as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and as president at Johns Hopkins University.In this impressive biography, Bruce L. R. Smith examines Gordon's substantial contributions to U.S. mobilization during the Second World War, Europe's postwar economic recovery, the security framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and U.S. policy in Latin America. He also highlights the vital efforts of the advisers who helped Gordon plan NATO's force expansion and implement America's dominant foreign policy favoring free trade, free markets, and free political institutions.Smith, who worked with Gordon at the Brookings Institution, explores the statesman-scholar's virtues as well as his flaws, and his study is strengthened by insights drawn from his personal connection to his subject. In many ways, Gordon's life and career embodied Cold War America and the way in which the nation's institutions evolved to manage the twentieth century's vast changes. Smith adeptly shows how this "wise man" personified both America's postwar optimism and as its dawning realization of its own fallibility during the Vietnam era.

Can the reading public imagine a less likely but more needed book than Stories for Men - a seventy-five-year- old anthology edited by Charles Grayson - written in an age when such a title would scarcely raise an eyebrow! Imagine a book about men in which the featured theme is not rapists, child abusers, or men who never weep, feel little sorrow, or prefer dog fighting to baseball.To say the least, this is a counter-cultural collective portrait necessary in today's politically correct world. The original editor, Charles Grayson, hit the nail on the head in his "explicit" opening remarks. "The only claim we make for this book is that it doesn't pretend to offer the best, or the finest, in the world's foremost short stories by contemporary masters. Simply it is just a bundle of yarns by present day American writers, each dealing with a different phase of the actions and activities of men, designed for good reading." The text fulfills its mission.The work features little known short stories by such major writers as Erskine Caldwell on racial relations, James M. Cain on murder, James T. Farrell on street life, Dashiell Hammett on men and divorce, Ring W. Lardner on baseball, Damon Runyon on football, William Saroyan on horseracing, Thomas Wolfe on travel, William Faulkner on foreigners, among many others. For readers interested in a slice of America, this will be a book of inestimable value as well as personal pleasure. Stories for Men will prove ideal.