TITLE: PREPARING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
AUTHOR: PAUL KENNEDY
PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 428 PAGES; $25
THE BOTTOM LINE: This is an egghead coffee-table book that all will discuss, many will buy, yet few will manage to finish.
British-born Yale University historian Paul Kennedy became a mass-market commodity with the publication of his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in 1987, a cross-century, cross-cultural study of the vital link between economic and military power. So what if Kennedy -- never a popularizer -- force-fed readers far more about the Habsburg Empire than most of them ever wanted to know? What...