Our Library Overfloweth

THE SCRAPBOOK is exhausted. It always looks forward, with special pleasure and quasi-parental pride, to reading new books by WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editors, frequent contributors, and special friends. But this fall has brought a bumper crop. There are so many--and they're so grip ping--that THE SCRAPBOOK has been running short on time for sleep. The rest of you, though, can feel free to spread your reading out over a couple of months, or more. This week, THE SCRAPBOOK confines itself to noting the new history and war books by its colleagues; next week (we're not all politics and war, after all), the other worthies.

From contributing editor Robert Kagan: Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. A gripping history of American foreign policy (the first of two volumes), it provides a genuinely fresh account of that history--decisively refuting the conventional view of an isolationist past, and showing how deeply embedded in American history and the DNA of the American regime is a policy of ambitiously promoting liberal democracy. This will come to be seen--trust us--as a major work in the study of U.S. history and the sources of U.S. foreign policy.

From contributing editor Frederick W. Kagan: Two (!) hefty volumes, each essential for scholars and experts in the relevant fields, but also of general interest. First, The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801-1805, the first installment of a four-volume study of Napoleon and Europe. And second, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy, which provides essential background to the current debates over military transformation. If only Donald Rumsfeld had read this . . .

And speaking of Kagans: Don't neglect The Eye of Command by Kimberly Kagan, ancient historian and an occasional contributor to these pages. Based on her study of Roman military authors, Kagan demonstrates that the commander's view of a battle is fundamental to understanding its shape and outcome, thereby providing an important corrective to the grunt's-eye approach to military history popularized by John Keegan in his Face of Battle.

And speaking of war: contributing editor Max Boot's magisterial War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today has just been released. John McCain blurbed it as "sweeping and erudite, while entirely accessible to the lay reader." We couldn't agree more.

Buy them all. Read them. Persuade others to read them. And give them as gifts (they're all uncommonly handsome).

It's Raining Obamas

A tip of THE SCRAPBOOK'S homburg to Thomas Frye of Laytonsville, Md., for the funniest--and most perceptive--letter to the editor of the Washington Post in recent memory. We've illustrated it with scans of the photos to which he refers.

IS HE THE POST'S CANDIDATE?

Good morning, boys and girls! Today [Sept. 28] we're going to show you Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
On Page B2, see Obama looking amused but pensive.
On Page C1, see Obama smile. See how friendly he is?
On Page C2, see Obama looking serious. That shows us that he cares.
Also on C2, see Obama with a pretty girl. Don't you think Obama is good-looking, too?
The Post really likes Obama. Can you tell?

--Thomas Frye
Laytonsville

'Shotty' Research

It's election season, so the English medical journal The Lancet, as it did two years ago, has released a purportedly scientific analysis of the deaths caused by the coalition in Iraq, during and since the war. The death toll they allege--upwards of 600,000--is not given credence outside the ranks of those who, like the editor of The Lancet himself, shout themselves hoarse at antiwar rallies over the depredations of the "axis of Anglo-American imperialism."

THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite debunking, both substantively and because it contained an inspired neologism (we refuse to believe it was a misspelling), came from a blogging M.D. known as "Medpundit."

The researchers spent two months canvassing households in various regions of Iraq asking about deaths in the family. Sometimes they were able to confirm the reports with death certificates, sometimes they weren't. They didn't ask if the dead were combatants or non-combatants. They were afraid to ask that question. Afraid for themselves and for those they were asking. They interviewed 40 households in each of their selected regions, then extrapolated the 600,000 figure from the number of deaths they had recorded in their interviews. The margin of error of +/-200,000 speaks for itself. It's not reliable.

And sorry, but the defense that it's as soundly designed as can be expected for these kinds of public health surveys is a weak one. Retrospective, interview-based studies like this are poor designs. It may be the standard way of gathering data in the public health field, but that doesn't make it the best methodology, and it certainly doesn't make its statistics sound. For too long the field of public health has relied on these types of shotty numbers to influence public policy, whether it's the number of people who die from secondhand smoke or the number who die from eating the wrong kinds of cooking oils.

In a word--a word that brilliantly combines shoddy and the barnyard expletive such hit jobs masquerading as science deserve--it's a shotty piece of work.

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