Monday, February 13, 2012

Pg. 0: Stanley Karnow's In Our Image

About 25 years ago, my future wife was in graduate school. There, she was saddled with a long reading list. She decided that I should do some of the reading for her. “Here,” she said, thrusting a volume into my hands. “Read this and tell me what I think of it.”

Time passes. We have both changed in many ways, but by the grace of God we are still together and still reading. A happy time has once again come where I can aid her in a small way, simply by reading a book.

The book is In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines by Stanley Karnow. It won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1990. Read Karnow’s Wikipedia entry here.

Karnow is also the author of another great book, Vietnam: A History. I once asked an expert to recommend the best single book about the Vietnam War. The expert recommended Karnow's book. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

This blog will be a record of my thoughts and impressions of In Our Image. This blog is also an opportunity to experiment with Blogger, blogging in general, and Twitter, all of which (I admit with great shame) I come to as a very late adopter.

If this experiment is successful, I threaten you with the possibility that I may read and blog other books about PIMBS -- Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore.

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