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The New Performance Challenge helps establish competitive goals and continuously increase an organization's manufacturing operations to win more customer orders. ... Read more

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Chapters: Winfield Scott, Elizabeth Keckly, Alfred Jefferson Vaughan, Jr., Robert B. Pamplin, Dixon Hall Lewis, Fulwar Skipwith. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 48. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Seminole WarsBlack Hawk WarMexican-American War American Civil War Winfield Scott (June 13, 1786 May 29, 1866) was a United States Army general, and unsuccessful presidential candidate of the Whig Party in 1852. Known as "Old Fuss and Feathers" and the "Grand Old Man of the Army," he served on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history and many historians rate him the ablest American commander of his time. Over the course of his forty-seven-year career, he commanded forces in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and, briefly, the American Civil War, conceiving the Union strategy known as the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the Confederacy. He served as Commanding General of the United States Army for twenty years, longer than any other holder of the office. A national hero after the Mexican-American War, he served as military governor of Mexico City. Such was his stature that, in 1852, the United States Whig Party passed over its own incumbent President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, to nominate Scott in the United States presidential election. Scott lost to Democrat Franklin Pierce in the general election, but remained a popular national figure, receiving a brevet promotion in 1856 to the rank of lieutenant general, becoming the first American since George Washington to hold that rank. Winfield Scott was born on his family's plantation "Laurel Branch" in Dinwiddie County, near Petersburg, Virginia on June 13, 1786. He was educated at the College of William ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Key Piece in a Body of Work of Great Import
I have read and reviewed one earlier book by this author, and bought the two more recent works a week ago after realizing I had seriously under-estimated the relevance of this author's work to my holistic integrative "civilization resilience" intent.

This is a five-star book and I expect Upside of Down will be as well.

I was immediately struck by the grace with which the author credits key other minds in the body of the work rather than just as a footnote.

Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes, and a few other recommended readings:

+ Complexity soaring, need ideas for better institutions and better social arrangements.

+ Delusion of control over complex systems we barely comprehend

+ Citing Paul Rober: ideas co-equivalent to capital and labor

+ Not enough time to reflect (I am reminded of

The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

+ Full credit to H. G. Wells for anticipating the need for a World Brain to manage the complex of complexes

+ Excellent overview of mistakes by the economists.I recommend as well

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

+Wealth gaps + migrations = poor global management

+ Losing 25% of our biodiversity

+ Delays in policy understanding, decisions, action, and outcomes compound losses over time

+ Mike Whitfield cited on need for holistic view, keystone species, and radical differences in compressed time scales.I am reminded of everything written by Richard Falk, Ervin Laszlo and others in the 1970's and 1980's.

+ Population factor is profound

+ Corruption is the primary obstacle to reform

+ Garbage overtaking coastlines while nitrogen leeches into water and carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere

+ Citing David Harvey, "hypercapitalism" compresses time and space while over-producing both wasted production and concentrated wealth

+ Our collective ego is blocking our collective intelligence.See the new book, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

+ Losing our sense of place, not getting enough signals to understand the tipping point circumstances

+ Complexity goes awry (he cited Perrow, whose book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies remains a seminal work (simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and fix; complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and sometimes undiscoverable ways; we live in a constellation of complex systems well beyond our ken)

+ Complex systems characterized by multiplicity; causal feedback; some tightly coupled; interdependence; openness; synergy; and nonlinear behavior.

+ Chaos theory warns us that nature will magnify the smallest perturbation from humans

+ Four stages of human perception of nature: 1) Balancing; 2) Anarchic; 3) Resilient; 4) Evolving.

+ Citing Wally Broeker: "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks."

+ Social systems are path dependent, delay at any point can be disastrous

+ Lessons of financial crises: governments and the IMF are out of touch with speed and breadth of financial systemic changes; computer-driven changes can accelerate and deepen mistakes

+ Citing Kofi Annan: "imbalance between economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for long."

+ Author: social system out of synch with natural and technological systems

+ Software code doubling every two years, bugs a real problem, still in pre-industrial era

+ Information glut has a critical bottleneck, lack of a sense-making bridge from data to our cognitive absorption

+ Ingenuity is both technical and social

+ Our biggest problem is the failure of our economic institutions and policies

+ Washington DC bureaucrats, including senior CIA analysts, "largely out of their depth"

+ Pace of change, depth of ignorance, and political resistance all assume scary proportions

+ Self-organizing resilience and adapting systems could be key

+ As ingenuity gap widens "need imagination, metaphor, and empathy more than ever."

+ Afterword: relentless increase in complexity while "world economic system is profoundly dysfunctional."

+ Most interesting to me, as I have committed to publish a book on "Cultural Intelligence" in 2009, is the author's citing of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, saying culture is "information--skills, attitudes, beliefs, values--capable of affecting individuals' behavior."

There are other notes but Amazon imposes a word limit.This is a great book, and I honor it by listing other great and relevant works below (to my limit of ten):

The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

What we don't know can hurt us...
This poor book, it languished for three months on a shelf while I crammed my head with political science theories but after a concerted effort in the last 24 hours it is finished. What a great read! It has sent me to Amazon and the library to find several of its references to learn more about complexity, fitness landscapes and moral communities.

To be honest, I found it kind of dragged there in the middle but I loved Parts III and IV and it certainly helps to have the background of the first two parts when Homer-Dixon brings it all together in a damning indictment of our arrogant, materialistic, modern capitalist society.

My favourite idea from this book is that of fitness landscapes - the idea that there is not merely one peak of fitness (social, cultural, physical) that a species or society can evolve to but many alternate peaks, some higher than others. The problem is that we could be at a peak that is not as high as others but in order to get to a higher peak we have to travel through a valley of low fitness which means suffering and regression before we climb back up. Cool idea. Apparently it was first proposed by Sewall Wright in 1932.

Homer-Dixon threads his discussion with the idea that one of the human brain's greatest abilities is its capacity to form metaphors and analogies. The idea of a fitness landscape which was originally developed to explain biological evolution translates wonderfully to political and social theory. Perhaps our society has reached a peak of fitness but the problem is that our social and political elites are now preventing us from trying to find a higher peak and many people suffer as a result. Fascinating.

Homer-Dixon does not claim to have answers, but he has certainly provided us with a source from which to develop inquiry and a sense of urgency about the need to continue questioning.

Very lucid writer.
The book is most readable and easily followed while discussing some rather complex ideas. The author's ability to use analogies to which readers can relate is most enjoyable.

All metaphors but no facts
This author is nothing but a medievalist who equates modernity with evil.He has no scientificbackground (political science is not science) and he is not an economist.In fact he admits: "I have tried to elaborate an INTUITION or FEELING about the future" .Shirley MacLaine anyone?Everything to him is a metaphor for the human predicament: complexity, high speed, crises, unpredictability, confusion, despair, ad nauseum. (Maybe the author needs to read a book on chaos theory.) For those with an epistemology of reason, there is nothing to be learned from this treatise.For those who are as despondent as the author, well the good news for you guys is that life is utterly hopeless.

Probably one of the best scholastic works I've ever read
I grabbed this book in a duty free store in Asia and read it all the way back to the US. Needless to say that despite it being an academic book, it was very engrossing and interesting to read. After the first few chapters, I felt both helpless that we're moving at such a pace and have constructed a society where our ingenuity for solving problems is far less than the complexity of the problems and yet optimistic that someone brilliant was able to write a book of this caliber and it was fairly understandable. At times I found it hard to believe I was reading an academic book because it was just a very well written book (and highly researched with dozens of pages of endnotes).

I would highly recommend this book to thinkers and public policy students and professionals and to anyone who would appreciate a better understanding of the complexity of the world around them. ... Read more