Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power Paperback - 2008 - 1st Edition

"Illuminating . . . incisive." --The New York Times

"A lively and entertaining--if occasionally horrifying--read. . . . Like a master archaeologist who can see through the shards and stones of a dig to reconstruct the culture of the city below, Kaplan lays out all the failures, omissions, and delusions of Bush administration officials. The result is an account of the pathologies . . . of Washington itself . . . a caution about the limits of purely military power and the dangers of seeing the world as a morality play."

--Washington Post Book World

"Excellent and devastating. . . . Go, please, and buy Kaplan's book. His great work deserves attention and reward."

--Joe Klein, Time

"The inside history of our time, told with precision and confidence, by an author who knows where the secrets are kept."

--Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco

"For me, this book was full of revelations." --James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic

The disasters of American foreign policy these last eight years are well known. Why they happened continues to puzzle many. How to repair the damage is the biggest challenge the next president will face. In Daydream Believers, celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan--"one of our most incisive thinkers about strategic issues," according to Walter Isaacson--combines in-depth reporting and razor-sharp analysis to explain just how America got so far off track. Kaplan traces the origins of these catastrophic ideas, how they developed from as far back as fifty years ago, and how our next leaders can awake from the daydreams and see the world as it is.