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    <name><![CDATA[Jesse]]></name>
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  <id type="integer">4940637</id>
  <isbn>1558494529</isbn>
  <isbn13>9781558494527</isbn13>
  <ratings_count type="integer">2</ratings_count>
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  <title>Edward Lansdale's Cold War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)</title>
  <average_rating></average_rating>
  <link>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4940637.Edward_Lansdale_s_Cold_War</link>
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  <id type="integer">58974</id>
  <name>Jonathan Nashel</name>
  <ratings_count type="integer">2</ratings_count>
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    <rating>3</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <read_at>Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Tue Aug 04 20:10:53 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Tue Aug 04 20:23:14 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Interesting, but also frustrating. Lansdale was the model for the &quot;ugly American,&quot; which was actually a term of approbation in the 1958 bestseller--meant foreign-aid types who got out and got their hands dirty as opposed to sitting around the compound and complaining about the natives. But he wasn't the model for Alden Pyle, the &quot;quiet American&quot; in Graham Greene's novel. He was, if anything, a typical early-CIA type: an adman who used persuasion, both direct and indirect, to sell Filipinos (successfully), South Vietnamese (sort of successfully, if one considers the existence of South Vietnam something to celebrate), and Cubans (not at all successfully) on the greatness of the American way. He was a folklorist and madman (he originated the Christ-opposes-Fidel idea that was supposed to overthrow him, among many other zany ideas) who also spent a whole lot of time doing nobody-knows-what in various countries. (Cambodian President Sihanouk made several spy thrillers where he defeated a character named &quot;Lansdale,&quot; believing Lansdale had been behind, or connected with--prepositions are important, but hard to choose, here--several coup attempts.) So he was a fascinating guy, and this new diplomatic history (old diplomatic history plus cultural history and bits of lit crit, which I often enjoy) strains mightily to figure out what it all means. But so much of Lansdale still seems to be under wraps that we get three chapters that are more or less the same, silly connections of Lansdale's historical understandings to those of the 1950s consensus historians (as if; I mean, surely he went East with pretty much the same unthinking sense that the American way was the best way that most other agents of empire did, which makes him neither more nor less culpable than they are), and finally an attempt to both minimize Lansdale's inflated rep (Nashel keeps asserting that he did not, could not, have done all that he and his willing conspirators in the press claimed or hinted at) and maximize it (a closing section considers how badly things are going in the Philippines now, which is apparently Lansdale's fault). A frustrating book, all in all, not least given the amount of time the author appears to have spent fighting through all of this material.]]></body>
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