HOUSE OF WAR, by James Carroll
(Houghton Mifflin, $30; release date May 16, 2006)
With the revealing subtitle The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, this is essentially an expanded rewrite of Smedley Butler’s 1935 anti-war pamphlet War Is a Racket. Carroll traces the history of the Pentagon, and the entire military apparatus of the United States — working on the fundamental assumption that all of America’s [...]