{"id":35,"date":"2008-07-29T11:01:43","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T16:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=35"},"modified":"2009-04-07T05:02:15","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T12:02:15","slug":"arts-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Arts of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our political\/historical\/diplomatic reading club read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1878379658?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=relaxandhavef-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1878379658\">Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=relaxandhavef-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1878379658\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/> for our second title.  I chose this title rather quickly, based on its short length and its presence on a Highly Recommended Reading List from work.  The book was described by one book club member as &#8220;a core text.&#8221;   I think they described it as such because <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Arts of Power<\/span> is a collection of three long essays, each of which includes many, many definitions of terms related to diplomacy.  Reading the book, I was tempted to convert the content of the book into an organization chart or just an outline.    The third section, The Skills of a Diplomat, is the section that interested me the most since it had more examples of things that I need to learn how to do and more explanations of how those skills relate to each other.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, reading this book was like reading a very short dictionary.  But now I know the difference between a coalition and an alliance, and I have a great list of skills which I need to develop over time.  Amazingly for such a slim volume, the book club discussion was fairly lengthy.  Many of the definitions were challenging in their realism and led to some interesting conversations along the realism\/idealism line.  Several readers commented that reading this made them want to re-read and discuss Machiavelli&#8217;s <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Prince<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our political\/historical\/diplomatic reading club read Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy for our second title. I chose this title rather quickly, based on its short length and its presence on a Highly Recommended Reading List from work. The book was described by one book club member as &#8220;a core text.&#8221; I think they described it [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}