The Way of the World by Ron Suskind


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ron Suskind has a way of writing about current events and feeling like you live thru them. He follows the lives of several people in the years 2006-2008: an Afghan high school exchange student, a Pakistani college grad in the US, several CIA operatives, lawyers defending prisoners detained at Gitmo, Benazir Bhutto, George Bush and Dick Cheney. The message Suskind brings is clear: America's political leaders have lost their moral authority by pursuing an "annthing it takes to win" approach, even when that involves outright lieing to the American public about WMDs and terrorists cells in Iraq as a pretext for invading Iraq. Suskind can not be well liked by the former members of the Bush White House as he portrays them as people who lived by the maxim "don't confuse me with the facts, I know what I believe." Yet Suskind ends with a positive view of the ordinary American citizen who stills believes and lives by the values of honesty, integrity and compassion. I came away with a different feeling: that our place as a nation in the world has been severely undermined by the hypocrisy of our stated values (democracy, freedom, integrity, compassion) not being backed by our actions as country. I see the crumbling of the Empire, and its not pretty.

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