American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stC entury

American Theocracy gets into the big issues that are dragging the U.S. down: religion, oil, and debt. It’s a wake-up call about how these three things are shaping our future for the worse (he predicted the 2008 crisis). A former Republican insider, the book feels like a mix of insider knowledge and tough love. A thought-provoking read. It makes you stop and think about where we’re headed as a country and whether we’re repeating mistakes from the past. You'll want to tell your friends to read it.

I’d just like to point out two very odd mistakes: In referring to Dutch whaling he says: “This centered in waters around Spitsbergen, the barren 15,000-square-mile island just north of the Arctic Circle, then Dutch-held and known as Amsterdam Island.” p. 6 The Dutch name for Spitsbergen IS Spitsbergen. It was never “Dutch-held”. It was more of a no-man’s-land, with the English and Danish only making claims to the region. Also, Amsterdam Island is the name for a small island off the northwest coast of Spitsbergen, not the Dutch name for the main island itself. “By 1637 the Dutch apparently had more than three hundred whaling ships and eighteen thousand men at Spitsbergen.” p. 7 The Dutch never sent out this many ships. The most they sent was about 250, and that was in the 1680s. During the 1630s they never sent more than a dozen ships to Spitsbergen—although more would have arrived later in the season.

A great read