Reviews
"A most enjoyable and intelligent book.
Brian Landers constructs a tightly argued
analysis, and never loses a beguiling narrative
drive."
Tim Waterstone (founder of Waterstone's
Bookshops)
"Brian Landers has written a piercing
account of American history from its colonial
beginnings to its present role as an unacknowledged
empire that bestrides the world.
Concerned as he is to expose the myths that
nations create about themselves, he bases
his analysis upon a revealing comparison
of American and Russian expansion through
the centuries. This technique forces the
observer to recognise similarities, identity
differences and question why both similarities
and differences exist. In a sense,
then, the reader gets two books for the price
of one, Russian history as well as American.
The parallels are striking. In
the very same decade, the 1860s, Russia emancipated
its serfs and the US freed its slaves.
The ideology of corporate capitalism emerged
at the same time as Marxism.
Both nations marched towards the Pacific
from their ancestral lands, from the Thirteen
Colonies in the one case and from Muscovy
in the other. Both reached the
ocean by conquest of nomadic tribes - or
as Americans like to say, by ‘settlement’
or ‘colonisation’ or, occasionally,
by ‘annexation’.
And finally, to take a question, was there
really any difference between the Monroe
Doctrine that America used to justify its
interventions in Latin America and in the
Caribbean and the concept of ‘Pan-Slavism”
that Russia prayed in aid when exercising
its designs on the Balkans?
This approach leads to a major theme of Mr
Landers’ work, that the US is and always
has been an imperialist power. Americans
act like imperialists, he writes, but don’t
talk like imperialists. It isn’t
even an established ‘fact’ that
there is or ever has been an American Empire.
What is a fact, however, is that since the
US marines invaded Libya in 1805, American
troops on average have intervened somewhere
abroad more than once a year.
Mr Landers is not a conventional historian.
His skills are derived from a business career
as well as from the academy.
This unusual combination produces rare insight.
He also has a way with aphorisms.
‘Russia is an inferiority complex trying
to find itself. America is a
superiority complex trying to sell itself.’
That is what ‘Empires Apart’
seeks to demonstrate."
Andreas Whittam Smith (founder of The Independent)
'The American and Russian Empires deserve
a Rough Guide – and Brian Landers’
book is that, and more.'
Mark Ellingham (Founder, Rough Guides)
"Simply staggering in vision, depth,
development of ideas and detailed research.
And it's also very readable and approachable.
The analysis along the way is very revealing
and a challenge to accepted thinking."
Sir Roger Martin (Founder Index Books and
Quality Books Direct)
