Dr. Jared McKinney (Air Command and Staff College) manages our book review program. The journal publishes book reviews to inform our readers and enhance the content of its articles. Reviewers are asked to analyze the book and provide an exclusive, original, unpublished, concise evaluation. The first section of the analysis should normally be the shortest and indicate the type of book (biography, anthology, history, monograph, etc.). Include a very short author biographic citation and then describe the context of the book in the literature of the field. Next, thoroughly analyze the thesis and arguments in the work. What are the strong points of the argument? What are the limitations in the work, including author biases? Is the thesis supported? What are the implications of the argument? Are there any profound aspects of the book? This section will be the longest part of the analysis. Finally, the analysis should finish with recommendations for improvement. Clearly state whether this book is worth reading, who may find this book most interesting, and why.
All books are free to reviewers. Each analysis must be submitted electronically within 45 days of book receipt. Limit your text to approximately 1,000 words, carefully edited.
Submit reviews or questions via e-mail to: jared.mckinney@au.af.edu or JIPA@au.af.edu. If you are interested in reviewing a book other than those listed below, please discuss the matter with Dr. McKinney.
Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia, by David L. Shambaugh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Book Review: Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam by Ingo Trauschweizer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019. 328 pp. ISBN: 978-0813177007.
Book Review: China’s Crisis of Success, by William H. Overholt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 304 pp.
Book Review: Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents, by David P. Barash. London: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, by Michael Mandelbaum. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 232 pp.
Book Review: Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution by Brian DeMare. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, 168 pp.
Book Review: The Aden Effect: A Connor Stark Novel by Claude Berube. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781612511982.
edited by Andrew S. Erickson. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019. Reviewed by Dr. John W. Tai China’s increasingly assertive—many would say aggressive—actions in the South China and East China Seas have captured the attention of the media and policy and academic communities. The most disconcerting aspect of those activities is that they have principally involved Chinese paranaval forces, with which the United States and its allies in the region have had little success confronting. This is an understudied topic and an urgent issue that must be addressed. Andrew S. Erickson and Ryan D. Martinson are faculty members of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College and are experts on the Chinese navy and China’s maritime activities. They are thus uniquely qualified and well-positioned to organize a conference of experts to discuss issues related to this topic. China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations is an outcome of such a conference.
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