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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (62255)	12/18/2002 1:18:24 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

When the Masters of Spin Go Silent antiwar.com

To: JohnM who wrote (62255)	12/18/2002 9:18:58 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

The list of source materials reads like someone who is doing or contemplating doing a book on these issues. Never considered it. There are way too many books out there already, many of them written by people with huge qualifications, to try and compete. It's impossible to do that kind of research from my location in any case. I have a scattering of books on the shelf, mostly dating back to days spent combing second-hand bookstores in Manhattan back in the early '80s, when I first became interested in these things, and a fat old file stuffed with faded photocopies, with "Middle East Sht" scrawled on it. Those are my sources. I did once contemplate writing a book on the American colonial period in the Philippines and the subsequent Philippine-American relationship, but discovered very early on that almost all of the research would have to be done in DC. The archives in Manila are a pretty grim place. It would also be a huge amount of work to put into a project with a very low probability of returning anything significant. I'm not a scholar. In fact I'm a word-whore of the lowest order: SI posts and the occasional social e-mail are about the only things I write without knowing somebody's going to pay me for what's being written. Do you have take on the Gilbert book?* No, I've never seen it. I will be in Manila in a few days, and will be browsing a few bookstores, looking for things I've seen mentioned here. I won't buy books online unless it's something I know I really want: I like to have a look at a book first, pick it up, hold it, read a few pages here and there, look at the references, the index. Too damned much sloppy stuff out there to go blowing money on unknown quantities.