While America Sleeps
Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace
(amazon)Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan (View Bio)
Hardcover: St. Martin's Press, 2000; Paperback: St. Martin's Press/Griffin, 2001.
"WHILE AMERICA SLEEPS is not a sleepy book. It is filled with bold statements and interpretations. It sounds a reveille to the American citizenry: to man the ramparts and defend itself against those who would seek to destroy the Republic. The book likens America's situation to that of Britain between the wars. The U.S., it is argued, has never been in greater peril....Donald and Frederick Kagan...have produced a riveting piece of diplomatic history with a lesson for the present....[T]heir book makes the boldest case so far for American internationalism. At a time when neither political party seems quite certain about America's role in the world, it's a case worth taking seriously." — The Wall Street Journal
"This book should be read carefully by policy makers in the new administration and in Congress." — The Washington Times
"Theirs is a polemic that manages, through meticulous detail, careful qualification, and absence of exaggeration, to avoid twisting the historical record." — The Weekly Standard
"A clarion call, a sounding of the tocsin or a plea to heed history's dire warnings — all are a fair way to describe WHILE AMERICA SLEEPS, an unflinching polemic nested in the language of historical research and contemporary strategic analysis. A father-son duo — the former a renowned professor of history and classics at Yale, the latter a professor of military history at the United States Military Academy — Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan adjure us to wake up lest America after the Cold War repeat the grave errors of Britain after World War I." — The New York Times Book Review
"[A] frightening story of close parallels between Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s and America in the 1990s....[W]ritten in acid.... Readers...will be impressed by the force of their argument and the power of their reasoning." — Publishers Weekly
