Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Rise and Fall of Great Powers at Amazon.com. The narrative was crisp. Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2016. And with it the author has shown himself to be something of a schemer, at least in the way he manages a narrative. Verified Purchase. In real life children are not so docile or incurious. Its dramatic reversals were pleasurable, too, because, like all well-earned narrative surprises, they seemed inevitable in retrospect: The author had stitched in the clues, and you were a fool not to have noticed them. In this book, Paul Kennedy is searching for a pattern to explain "the rise and fall of great powers".He studies and reports on economic and military factors that accompanied or caused previously dominant nations to … In other words, “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” is knottier than “The Imperfectionists,” and more deliberately confusing. There can be no rise of a great military without that country first having a booming economy. Unfortunately, I don't think the American give tinkers damn or they would stop this madness in Washington. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.This page works best with JavaScript. This is a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the current state of affairs.After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.Top subscription boxes – right to your door,See all details for Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2016. This twenty-seven year time lag that a reader in 2016 leads to make mincemeat out of some of the conclusions such as this rapid rise of Japan and the role of Europe as a potential large power (this was before the 1990s Asia financial crisis and of course the 2000s global financial crisis).Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2017.The book is highly informative, and goes into a lot of detail explaining why some empires rise and some fall. To say that it needs updating is akin to saying that a fine 1987 automobile would have to be updated to reflect the latest in that technology in today's economy - well duh? Key word, "Corruption ",Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2009.Having reread Kennedy's book after 20 years, I'll have to agree with many of the reviewers here regarding bulk of the work - it's an exceptional tour of world-power history over the last 500 years, not an introductory text by any reckoning - and disagree with them on the last chapters - they should be read, in context, for what they were at the time of the writing which is to say, exceptionally perceptive. I really enjoyed the author's take on why Europe prospered in the way it did, and how Britain's economy helped it shoulder the burdens placed on it by Napoleonic Wars.Kennedy is excellent and appears to cover the whole topic in its ...Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2016.The introduction chapter by P. Kennedy is excellent and appears to cover the whole topic in its entirety. Rise and Fall ofthe Great Powers is without question the best book to examine the issue of national decay and decline. “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” on the other hand, has a promiscuously omniscient narrator: As the story unfolds, the book’s readers learn all kinds of things about the characters, save … could have been edited for length better. Squinting at a city street map while walking along (Tooly intends to walk “every passable street in the five boroughs”), she has trouble reconciling how maps can be “so flat” when the places they represent are “so round.” Soon after we puzzle over why our heroine, who seems pretty sharp otherwise, does not have an understanding of something so basic as a street map, we are told that she is wearing mismatched Converse sneakers, one black and one red. Today's geopolitical landscape is much more fragmented than polarized as it was when Kennedy first published his book, 1988.